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BEATEN PATHS; 



6%^C £^^ 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 



BY 



ELLA W. THOMPSON. 



" It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there is nothing 
to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries ; but in land 
travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they 
omit it, as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation. 
Let diaries, therefore, be brought into use." 
h Bacon's Essays. 

"But then, alas ! they've read an awful deal. 

i A ( j ^ How shall we plan that all be fresh and new, 

/« /!„ ' ■' Important matter, yet attractive too ? " 

•"■'"' Fadst. 



.4336.6 



BOSTON: 4 

LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 

NEW YORK: 

LEE, SHEPARD AND DILLINGHAM. 

1874. 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, 

By lee and SHEPARD, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



THE LIBRA&rl 
OF CONGRESi 

WASHINGTOH 






8TEBEOTTPED AT THB 
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOirNDBT, 

19 Spring Lane. 









THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 

TO 

MARY E. BLAIR 

("St. Ursula"), 

WHOSE WISE FORETHOUGHT AND TENDER CARK 

MADE THE JOURNEY HEREIN DESCRIBED 

A TREASURE OF DELIGHT; 

AND TO 

TH€ FIVE OTHER PILGRIMS 

FROM " THE ROSE-BUD GARDEN OF GIRLS," 

WHO FILLED IT WITH LAUGHTER 

AND SONG. 



CONTENTS. 



^,».^rr,x^« PAGE 

CHAPTER 

I. Chester. . ^ 

II. Scotland • . . 22 

III. Scotland ^^ 

IV. From Edinburgh to London. . « • 53 
V. A Walk in Westminster. . • . .65 

VI. London in Water Colors. . ' . . » 80 

VII. Sunday in London • 91 

VIII. Belgium l^"^ 

IX. Germany. ^^^ 

X. The Khine, . ... . . . 135 

XI. More Germany. . . . . • .148 

XII. Switzerland. 1^2 

XIII. Shore of Lake Leman. . . • • • ISO 

XIV. Geneva ^^^ 

XV. Chamounix 206 

XVI. Paris. . ^^^ 

XVII. Paris ^^^ 

XVIII. Homeward Bound 267 

7 



BEATEN PATHS; 

OR, 

A WOMAN'S VACATION. 



CHAPTER I. 

CHESTEE. 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 
Nor iron bars a cage." 

WANT to say, to begin with, that the writer of this 
book is one of " the few, the immortal few," left of her 
sex in America, who would rather have an India shawl 
any day than the suffrage ; but in dark moments, when 
both have seemed equally unattainable, it has occurred 
to her that most women's lives are passed, so to speak, 
in long, narrow galleries, built about with customs and 
conventionalities more impervious than stone. Some- 
times they contract to a hot little kitchen, and the 
owner might as well be a Vestal Virgin, and done with 
it, her whole life being spent in keeping up the fire;, 
again, like Maud Muller's, these walls " stretch away 
into stately halls." They may be more or less hung 
with pictures or padded with books, but they are walls 
all the same. Plenty of doors lead out of these gal- 
leries, but only those marked " Church," " Visits," and 
" Shopping," move easily on their hinges. 

9 



10 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Most of us, and especially those who have been 
nourished on the east winds of Boston, cast longing 
eyes at the door marked with the maojical word 
" Europe," and it has opened freely enough when 
the husband said the "Open, sesame;" it is only 
of late years that women have made the amazing 
discovery that they can say it themselves with like 
success, but it is well to keep the hinges well oiled, 
and the rubbish cleared away from the threshold. 
When my* turn came, I felt as if I had been taken into 
a high mountain and been promised all the kingdoms 
of the earth, and had at once accepted the offer. 

I joined my European fortunes, for better or worse, 
to six other anxious, but no longer aimless women ; 
seven is a fortunate and famous number, and we felt 
that what seven women could not do was not worth 
doing. We cast behind us all thought of those other 
seven, our prototypes in the uncomfortable times of the 
Bible, who all laid hold upon one man, that he might take 
away their reproach. We meant to have no reproaches, 
nor men either. 

The ice once broken, the thing was so easy we won- 
dered we had not done it before. If you know how 
to read and write, you can easily procure a passport, 
steamer ticket, and letter of credit ; the hackman knows 
where the wharf is, if you don't, and once on bonrd, 
you have only to say your prayers, and eat four meals 
a day, till you see land again. American women, how. 
ever "lone and lorn," are always entreated softly by 
their own countrymen ; if the latter have any amiabil- 
ity about them, they invariably take it with them on 
their travels. It is a trait peculiar to them among 



A WOMAN'S vacation: 11 

Anglo-Saxons — one of the few things that did not 
come over in the "Mayflower;" the Pilgrims must 
have picked it np in the wilderness. 

There are people who actually profess to enjoy a 
steamer passage to Liverpool ; I always think how un- 
happy they must have been before .they left home. 
The motion of a screw-steamer is like riding a gigantic 
camel that has the heart disease, and you do not miss 
a single throb. 

There is nothing to do, and too many to do it with. 
There are no colors so fast that salt water will not fade 
them ; brunettes change least ; the sharp wind only 
makes a brighter flame burn in their cheeks ; but it is 
merciless to the fair, delicate faces, whose beauty de- 
pends on the lighter shades of pink, blue, and yellow. 

There are traditions handed down from voyage to 
voyage, that men have fallen in love at sea. I never 
saw it with my bodily eyes, nor knew any one who 
had ; but they must have been much undermined in 
sense, and just ready to take the disease before they 
left home. Flirtation and shabbiness do not naturally 
go hand in hand ; they are almost as hostile as common 
sense and prettiness. Cleopatra herself would have 
loolTed faded in her oldest gown, and without her ear- 
rings ; and Antony would have ceased to be her " man 
of men " in a flannel shirt and an unkempt beard. In 
the shapeless costumes of steamer life, one may gather 
a faint notion of how this world will look when the 
latest ideas of dress reformers are carried out. Men 
have dressed sensibly for many years; but he must 
be a perfect Adonis who is absolutely handsome in a 
straight suit of black broadcloth. When women are 



«£> 



12 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

reduced to the same level in black silk trousers and 
loose blouses, then for the sake of beauty and bright- 
ness lying at their last gasp, men must go back to the 
gay fashions of the time when old Samuel Pepys took 
the gold lace off his wife's wedding petticoat to trim 
his new suit. 

One cannot heli3 perceiving at once that these long 
days, homeless as orphans and briny as tears, die a 
much easier death at men's hands than at ours. They 
positively seem to wring a kind of salt comfort out of 
this rough, scrambling, ungloved life at sea; the taste 
for barbarism and old coats, latent in all of them, comes 
to the surface. Women never can be really happy 
in any condition where they lose their good looks. 
There was a vast amount of laughter and gayety on 
our steamer, but I am persuaded it was but an empty 
show ; we were all actors and actresses, and our real, 
unvarnished selves would have wandered up and down 
the deck like the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis, hold- 
ing our hands on our hearts, and speaking no word to 
one another. 

One must be very young and very joyful, or very 
old and very weary, to really squeeze any juice of 
delight out of that greenest of lemons, a steamer 'pas- 
sage across the Atlantic. 

I was not seasick — that was the woe of it ! to 
be seasick and to get over it, is a good thing for the 
body, if not for the soul ; but to be ineffibly miser- 
able, too dizzy to read or knit, or play any game, and 
yet able to eat and sleep, so that no one puts faith 
in you, is too tedious for endurance. I know nothing 
to compare with it for boredom, unless it be your 
honeymoon when you haye married for money. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 13 

At the best, it is a sort of intermediate state between 
death and life, not unlike the Catholic purgatory, an 
uneasy and nnfragrant place, in which to repent one's' 
sins and make good resolutions ; and the last day, 
when the steamer plods by the Irish coast, is like the 
resurrection in this, that people keep coming up whom 
you had utterly forgotten ; and unlike it, in that all are 
happy and smile real smiles at each other, instead of 
the mechanical grins of mid-ocean. 

I know not whether the shores of the Mersey are 
really picturesque, and studded with lovely villas, or 
whether, intoxicated by the breath of the land, I should 
have seen beauty in the sands of the Desert, and grace 
in the humps of its camels. 

Liverpool is just the doorstep of England — we 
onlv stand on it lone: enou2:h to be let into "our 
old home." If you tnke a dock and multiply it by 
twenty miles, the answer is Liverpool ; but only half 
an hour distant lies the moss-grown, old, Roman city 
of Chester, where the sums were all done, and the 
slate hung up, ages ago. There is a royal road for 
travellers, and most Americans choose it ; they stop at ^ 
the kind of hotel which our countrymen have put to- 
gether, out of equal parts of plate-glass and ice-water, 
marble pavements and supercilious waiters. They 
travel in first-class carriages, because they have heard 
that the nobility do so, and scatter money about as \^ 
if they were slaves to it, and were anxious to get rid 
of their tyrant. All their trophies are bracelets, and 
laces, and silks that will stand alone. Their poor re- ^ 
lations who*stay at home, suppose that the gates of 
foreign countries are closed, except to such royal prog- 



14 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

resses. Armies of people, especially women, yearn 
all their lives to look on the cathedrals and pictures 
of Europe, and die without the sight, because some 
'^ snob has said that there is no comfort in going abroad, 
unless one can spend a thousand dollars a month. 

An Englishman never travels, it is said, without 
taking all England with him, and Americans carry 
nearly always a swelling desire that the greatness of 
^ their country should be distinctly seen in their single 
selves ; they never can realize that England is a pocket 
volume, and America an encyclopaedia. It is both pos- 
sible and delightful to strike into other roads, in the 
beginning, than the broad one, where the crowd is — 
country roads bordered with green hedges, leading to 
quaint old inns that have not changed their names 
since Chaucer's time. 

Even in these places they know how to take in 
strangers, for Americans are fair prey everywhere in 
Europe ; but you get at the old stories and customs of 
the place, and lay up stores for winter evenings at 
home — memories that will do duty when moth and 
rust have corrupted bracelets and laces. 

To travel over Europe, thinking always of bodily 
comfort, is equivalent to taking rooms at the best hotel 
• in New York for the same length of time, eating and 
drinking, and lounging for a steady business, and inci- 
dentally reading guide-books. 

I said all this with firm faith in its good sense, then^ 
as I say it now — " what is true anywhere is true every- 
where ; " and yet it did not stand by me in the hour of 
need. Chester has two or three large and gorgeous 
^hotels, in which the American eagle can flnp his wings 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 15 

as boldly as if he were at home ; but it is also rich in 
those ancient inns, in which all the characters of Eng- 
lish literature have taken their ease since the English 
world began. 

"Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn ?" said Fal- 
staff; and he might have taken it, pressed down and run- 
ning over, where we did, in the little caravansary called 
"Blossom's." It was quaint, old-fashioned, and ram- 
bling enough to go bodily into one of Dickens's novels, 
without paring off" a single feature. All sorts of wind- 
ing passages led to corner cupboards and unexpected 
bedrooms. It should have been called nothing less 
than the " Red Lion," or, better still, the " Great White 
Horse," where Mr. Pickwick stopped when he made 
" the most extraordinary mistake of his life," in get- 
ting into the same bedroom with the lady in the yellow 
curl-papers. Sam Weller shook his head doubtfully 
over it, but the same thing might happen at "Blossom's " 
every night, with nobody to blame. 

A buxom Welsh girl, in a white cap, answers your 
bell, instead of a waiter unhappy in a white tie and a 
swallow-tailed coat. The narrow hall gives a glimpse 
of the kitchen, with great joints and shoulders of meat 
hanging from the ceiling, as it did in the franklin's 
house, in the Canterbury Tales, where, says Chaucer, — 

'^It rayned of meat and drinke." 

Your meals are served smoking hot, in a bright, 
queer little parlor up stairs, and within ten minutes of 
your arrival your feeling is, that you have lived there 
before in some previous state of existence, and have 
only come back to your old haunts at last. Unfortu- 



16 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

nately "Blossom's" is cheap, so that few Americans will 
ever be brought to believe in it. We thought ourselves 
in English clover, till we met some steamer acquaint- 
ances at the door of the " Grosvenor," a grand hotel, 
built by the Marquis of Westminster, for the spoiling 
of the Egyptians. It was one of the Crcesus party who 
stood on the stairs, and said, in the true Croesus tone, 
which makes one's blood run backward on the instant, — 

"Are you quite sure you are comfortable? 'Blos- 
som's' is so very dingy and unprepossessing, on the 
outside at least." 

We were well fortified with all the reasons herein 
mentioned for choosing an English inn, rather than a 
transplanted American hotel ; but we must have been 
more or less than Americans if this bit of deprecating 
patronage had not found a chink in our armor. 

We were not strong-minded enough to bear .the 
thought of Mr. Croesus supposing that we chose " Blos- 
som's " out of poverty, for are we not all taught from 
our cradles that poverty is the unpardonable sin? 
This sort of patronage pricks sharply at first, but one 
learns to expect it in one's travelling countrymen as 
surely as beggars in Ireland, or fleas in Italy. We soon 
after filed into a second-class car, under fire of the Croesus 
party, and when we had time to take stock of our feelings, 
were surprised to find so few killed and wounded. 

Another form of it is the absolute conviction of each 
party of travellers, that they, and none other, have 
made the perfect tour. If you have been through 
Scotland without visiting the Trosachs, you have made 
the grand mistake of your life ; or if you have studied 
the Trosachs, and passed Glasgow by on the other side, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION 17 

the result is the same ; it is one of those rare rules that 
work both ways with j^erfect smoothness. 

Chester is a "well of English undefiled;" the walls 
built by the Romans, when its name was Castra 
(camps), have been constantly kept up and restored, 
and now clasp the waist of the city with a red stone 
girdle, two miles round. They are from twelve to forty 
feet high, crossing over the streets on arches, and form 
a broad, even footpath, fiom which to gaze into all the 
faces of Chester. 

They were built first in A. D. 61, and a daughter of 
Alfred the Great once mended some rents in them, 
which must have wofuUy used up her pocket-money. 
On one of the towers Charles I. stood, to watch the 
defeat of one of his armies, and I suppose that solemn, 
haunting face of his grew even longer and peakeder 
than Vandyke paints it. These red walls are odd 
and picturesque in their way; but were Chester and her 
walls to be set down bodily on American soil, a new 
army of Irishmen and pickaxes would shortly encamp 
round about her, and leave not one stone ujoon another. 
The railroad has breached them, but in the olden time 
there were only four gates, defended by certain great 
lords and their followers. 

The River Dee flows lazily by the city, as if loath to 
leave it, the same Dee which flows sorrowfully through 
that little song of Kingsley's : — 

*' O Mary, call the cattle home, 
Across the sands of Dee." 

The river gives a good gift to Chester in the way of 
salmon, and the cook at " Blossom's " folded each piece 
in a bit of white paper, to keep the juice in while she 
2 



18 BEATEN PATHS, OR, 

broiled it. It is odd to peck one's breakfast out of a 
paper bundle, but in no other way can one reach all the 
possibilities contained in salmon. 

The houses in many old streets, called " The Rows," 
thrust out the second story from ten to twenty feet^ 
and rest it on pillars, as if^ after some sudden shock 
(perhaps the defeat of Charles I. under the walls), they 
had proposed to go outside and see about it, and after 
making the first step had thought better of it, and 
staid where they were. 

The covered ways, thus secured, are excellent loafing 
places in a rainy climate. On one of the oldest houses, 
with figures of ancient saints bulging out of the front, 
is the inscription, " God's providence is mine inherit- 
ance." The population have an easy, leisurely way of 
taking life, as if they had all some sort of an inherit- 
ance, and it would be all the same a hundred years 
hence whether this generation bestirred itself or not. 
Small boys in Chester, as in other parts of England, 
wear tall beaver hats, sometimes w^ith a band of crape 
about them, which gives to the American eye an ab- 
surd intimation that they have lost their first wives. 

The cathedral of Chester is a good one to begin with, 
since it is the oldest and plainest in England. It is 
about to be restored in its own style, but new stones 
will rather take away than add to the satisfying beauty 
that now clothes its broken arches. The abbey at- 
tached to it once embraced great tracts of fertile coun- 
try and many good houses, which paid tithes of mint 
and cumin to the fat abbots, till the time of Henry 
VIII. Monks knew how to be comfortable, as well as 
other sinful souls. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 19 

" The friars of Fail 
Gat never owre hard eggs or owre hard kale, 
For they made their eggs thin wi' butter 
And their kale thick wi' bread. 
And the friars of Fail, they made good kale 

On Fridays, when they fasted. 
They never wanted gear enough 

As lang as their neighbors' lasted." 

They served the Lord right cheerfully in Chester, eat- 
ing salmon on fast days, till the bluff king fell in love 
with Anne Boleyn, and trampled the Catholic Church 
and her monks under his feet, in order to marry her. 

When tlie monks were driven out of their soft places, 
and all the days were fast-days, they must have been 
good Christians, indeed, if they did not couple "anath- 
ema maranatha" with the woman's name who was at 
the bottom of it. They must have borne with great 
fortitude the news of her beheadinjr. 

The wood carvings in the cathedral are more curious 
than beautiful. It certainly does not assist devotion to 
have one end of your pew guarded by an astonished 
griffin, and the other by a covv^led monk, or to look up 
to a pulpit carved all over with such heads as usually 
confine themselves to dreams and masquerades. It is 
as if the old carvers had interpreted literally the com- 
mand that the gospel was to be preached to every crea- 
ture, dragons and all. 

Two curious epitaphs caught my eyes in wandering 
about the cloisters. One praised a certain Frederick 
Philipse, citizen of the province of New York, a faith- 
ful subject of the king, who fled to England in the 
"late rebellion." As he died in 1783, it proved to be, 
not the late unpleasantness, which we call " the rebel- 



20- BEATEN PATHS, OR 

lion," but that earlier scrimmage which success made 
into a revolution. 

There are many little phrases cut into the enduring 
English stone, touching American affiirs, which force 
the traveller to set his thoughts back on the dial-plate 
of time for a hundred years or more. 

A "cheap stone" sets forth that Dean Arderne, 
of the cathedral of Chester, "did give and bequeath 
all his money to the church from which he drew it 
(tho' he loved his family), wishing the clergy to con- 
sider whether it were not a sort of sacrilege to divert 
all their money from the church to relatives who were 
not needy." It would tend to edification if they had 
put up another "cheap stone," to tell what the rela- 
tives thought about it, and whether it had ever con- 
vinced any rich priest that blood is not thicker than 
water, e'en though it be holy water. 

Most of the monkish lands and treasures have fallen 
to the share of the Marquis of Westminster, who 
seems to have outsjrown the curse that used to attach 
to church lands in the hands of the laity. 

He has a park and country seat called Eaton Hall, 
near Chester, which is one of the show-houses of Eng- 
land. We could see only the outside, as it was under- 
going repairs at the rate of ten thousand pounds a 
week. The park is only thirty-six miles round, and 
has four churches within its limits. I did not hear 
whether the marquis went to church four times a Sun- 
day. The park is dotted with great oak trees, whose 
thickness puts likelihood at once into that old story of 
Charles II. being hid in an oak, unseen, while his pur- 
suers took counsel beneath it. American oaks would 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 21 

keep no man a secret. Groups of deer feed all about 
the park in all peace and calmness, securely fenced in 
by the game laws. All Chester and its visitors drive 
and walk freely in this estate, which is really a joint- 
stock affair, and possibly pays better interest to a stran- 
ger in a single visit, than to its owner in all his life. 

The favorite vehicle on a Sunday afternoon seems to 
be a sort of two-wheeled cart, with timber enough in 
it to make half a dozen buggies, and two seats, back to 
back. Any number of children, from three to six years 
old, cling about the back seat, and nothing less than a 
special Providence, or an Act of Parliament, keeps 
them from flying off like sparks from a hot wheel. 

Chester is the grand " meet" for the mighty hunters 
of all the country side. A certain Lord Grosvenor, 
brother of the marquis, is Nimrod himself; he hunts 
every week-day, and looks at his horses on Sunday. 

I forgot to say, what cannot be said too often of Eng- 
lish ways, that the first thing to do on landing is to 
marry an umbrella, and never to separate from it on ^ 
any incompatibility whatever. Nature waters her 
English plants whenever she happens to think of it, 
without the least calculation as to when she did it last, 
and they repay her bounty with an intense greenness 
and thick luxuriance, as if every separate leaf had its 
own polishing. Chester is in sight of the Welsh 
mountains, and many of its inhabitants are buried un- 
der Welsh epitaphs, without a vowel in them. 

The commonest name on the street signs is "Wil- 
liams," which has no root out of Wales. If the old 
Welsh saying be true, that "the way of the Williamses 
is always towards their duty," Chester must be a very 
steady-going place. 



22 BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER 11. 

SCOTLAND. 

*'Up with the bonnie blue bonnet, 
The dirk and feather and a' ! " 

F one visits Scotland at all, it is well to do it early 
in one's tour, before the mind is jaded, and the 
pockets emptied, by the magnificent vanities of the 
continent. 

The journey is easily made in a day from Chester 
to Edinburgh, passing the border at Gretna Green, the 
famous place for runaway marriages. 

This sleepy little village looks innocent enough now, 
but it has had far more than its share of the tragedy 
and comedy of the world. The old blacksmith, who 
tied so many hard knots for distressed lovers, is long 
since dead and gone where he will do no more of that 
work, and the sweet old flavor of romance clinging 
about a stolen marriage is well nigh gone too. The 
world has grown so practical, that to marry for love, 
and nothing else, is become simply ridiculous. 

The English country strikes one like a well-ordered 
room, swept and garnished,' and everything put away. 
There seems nothing for future babies to do, but to 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 23 

lean oil their hoe-handles and admire the industry of 
their forefathers, and all the laborers that we observed 
in the fields had even now begun to do it, with one 
accord. 

The yellow broom plant {plantagenista^ the sign of 
the Plantagenets) brightens all the fields. After pass- 
ing the border, the country grows rougher; a New 
Hampshire woman begins to feel herself at home, but 
the foreign feeling comes back when she sees the 
moors and hill-sides darkening under vast purple 
shadows, which prove to be heather. 

Who first saw the resemblance of Edinburgh to 
Athens was, doubtless, a good Scotchman ; but the 
inan who evolved, from his inner consciousness, its 
likeness to Boston, must have been a Bostonian of the 
most exalted patriotism, and deserves a statue in the 
State House yard. 

Edinburgh is a city set on a hill, and is so entirely a 
part of that hill, that it is difiicult to believe that men's 
hands had anything to do with the beginning of it; 
the first impression of the "Castle" must be that it 
grew out of the ground, and a naked troop of Picts 
and Scots, seeking what they might devour, found it 
and took possession. 

One of the guide-books says that Edinburgh may be 
*•*• done'''' i\\ a day; that guide-book must have been* 
written by the man who thought he could have made 
a better world than this in less than a week. Amer- 
icans draw their character and strong points so largely 
from the Scotch, that it behooves them to linger long 
and lovingly on its soil. Princes Street is well named ; 
the monuments of Scott and Burns keep guard at 



24 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

either end, and fine houses, fit for princes, line all the 
way. 

If God made the country, and man made the town, 
they worked together in Edinburgh ; the great hills 
clasp it like arms ; the air in summer is " coldly-sunny," 
with a flavor of mountains in it, and early in the morn- 
ing one is waked by the "sweet jargoning" of birds, 
as if each one were telling his dreams. 

The first sunset walk tends naturally to the Calton 
Hill, the "Acropolis" of Edinburgh, dedicated to dead 
Scotchmen ; the Parthenon, designed in imitation of 
the Greek temple of that name, and in honor of those 
who fell at Waterloo, began and ended with one row 
of Corinthian pillars, " a monument of Scotland's pride 
and poverty;" but an iron fence marks out the space 
which was to have been enclosed by the temple. After 
all, one may count himself fortunate if, in failure, he 
can forever show to people what he had meant to do. 

From the Calton Hill one gets the finest view of 
" Auld Reekie," or the clouds of smoke hanging over 
it, which christened it by that name. 

In the valley under "Arthur's Seat" lies the old city, 
and the palace of Holyrood, with its familiar towers, 
which appear in the background of the best portrait 
of Queen Mary. The old Scotch gentry might as well 
have lived on ladders, for they built their houses four- 
teen or fifteen stories in height. Yet, according to their 
history, they were no nearer Heaven than their de- 
scendants. The hicjhest of these old towers have been 
taken down for safety, but nine and ten stories are still 
common. The dark alleys between them are well 
called " Closes." 



A WOMAN'S vacation; 25 

Everything in Edinburgh reminds you of Sir Wal- 
ter Scott. He is the petted son of his country, whose 
will is still law, and that country might well be spelled 
Scott-land since his death. The fine drive around 
Arthur's Seat was built because it was his favorite 
haunt ;^ he pays tribute to it in the seventh chapter 
of the Heart of Mid Lothian. The sun never set 
so beautifully to him as from the base of Salisbury 
Crags. 

Nichol Muschat's Cairn, the place of lonely horror 
where Jeanie Deans met her sister's betrayer, has been 
reached and surrounded by cottages and gardens. It 
is just a pile of stones to mark the place of any deed 
of violence. One of the worst of old Scotch curses 
was, "May you have a cairn for your grave." To see 
it in the midst of rural peaceful life, strikes one gro- 
tesquely, like locks of hair or any other souvenir of an 
old love kept for show on a centre-table. 

Jeanie Deans's cottage is still a comfortable house. 
One looks for Dumbiedikes tumbling down the hill on 
his stiff-necked pony, and for the moment one is oddly 
conscious of living and walking in a book instead of 
this present busy life. 

What one sees at Holyrood is more curious and 
moth-eaten than beautiful. Mary Stewart was but 
poorly lodged in her palace ; any gentlewoman of these 
latter days is better provided with space and light. 
The narrow winding stairs in the towers of Holyrood 
give a faint notion of the dark and tortuous ways of 
her court. It must have been very close quarters in 
the little supper room for Mary and her favorites, be- 
fore two or three of her lords, led by Darnley, her 



26 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

husband, stole up the winding stairs and killed Rizzio 
while clinging to her robe. Mary's admirers protest 
that Rizzio was not her lover, but had found grace in 
her eyes, because he was a good Catholic and a better 
fiddler. He was dragged across the chamber and the 
hall of reception, and left all night in his blood at the 
head of the staircase. When the deed was done, 
Mary dried her eyes and said, "I will now study re- 
venge;" but she put up a partition, cutting off a third 
of the hall to hide the spot on the floor. 

It was odd that those of us who had long been famil- 
iar with Queen Mary's sorrows saw distinctly the stain 
of Rizzio's blood, while those who heard the story for 
the first time could not see it at all. 

It is but barren travelling over places that men have 
made famous, if one brings no memories to clothe 
thera withal ; but when the old story and the reality 
come together, they fit like pieces of armor, joint to 
joint. 

Mary's mirror was scarce larger than her face, but 
she needed no flattery that she did not find in the eyes 
of her courtiers. 

The portraits of Scottish kings are shown by the 
dozen at Holyrood, kings in the dark ages, who not 
only never had a portrait, but niany of them never 
existed at all, outside the brain of the Scottish chron- 
icler. The kingdom fell into ill luck, and the Stev»^art 
line at the same time, when Marjory Bruce man led 
her handsome subject, Robert Stewart. When the 
news of Mary Stewart's birth was brought to her 
father in old Linlithgow Castle, after a great defeat of 
his army, he turned his face to the wall and groaned, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 27 

"The kingdom came wkh a lass, and it will go with a 
lass." 

The chapel of Holyrood, roofless and crumbling, is 
more lovely in its decay than it ever could have been 
in its early days. The stone remains where Mary 
knelt at her marriage with Lord Darnley, whom she 
called, at first sight, " the handsomest long man she had 
ever seen." 

It is one long climb from Holyrood to the Cnstle, 
which must have been intended by nature solely as a 
nest for eagles. On the way, one walks over a square 
stone in the pavement, which marks the place of the 
old " Tolbooth," or prison of the city. It was called 
the " Heart of Mid Lothian," and its massive door is 
built into the wall of Abbotsford. The Castle has 
never been taken except by treachery. A young man, 
taught by love, had found a way to climb over the wall 
to see the keeper's daughter (" of course there was a 
woman in it"), and he showed the path to thirty 
others, who surprised and took the Castle. It was the 
custom of Scottish queens to retire to the Castle, 
when expecting the birth of their children ; and here, 
in a little room not eight feet across at the longest, 
was born James VI. of Scotland and I. of England. 
The chronicle of the time tells what happened next. 

The young prince was ushered into the world be- 
tween nine and ten in the morning. Darnley came 
about two in the afternoon to see mother and child. 
"My lord," said Mary, "God has given us a son." 
Partially uncovering the infimt's face, she added a pro- 
test that it was his, and no other man's son. Then 
turning to an English gentleman present, she said, 



28 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

" This is the son who, I hope, shall first unite Scotland 
and England." He replied, " Why, madam, shall he 
succeed before your majesty and his father?" "Alas!" 
answered Mary. "His father has broken to me," allud- 
ing to his joining the murderous conspiracy against 
Rizzio. "Sweet madam," said Darnley, "is this the 
promise that you made, that you would forget and for- 
give all?" "I have forgiven all," said the queen, "but 
will never forget. What if Fawdonside's (one of the 
conspirators) pistol had shot? (She had felt the cold 
steel on her bosom.) What would have become of 
the child and me both?" "Madam," said Darnley, 
"these things are past." "Then," said the queen, "let 
thera go ! " And so ended this singular conversation. 

On the wall of this little room is a prayer that no 
one had greater need to offer than the beautiful 
queen : — 

*' Lord Jesu Christ that crounit was with Thornse, 
Preserve the birth, quhais Badgie heir is borne, 
And send his sonne successione to reign stille 
Lord in this real me, if that it be thy will. 
Als grant, O Lord, quhat ever of his proceed, 
Be to thy Honer and Praise. Sobied." 

I think there never was a woman from whom so 
niuch " proceeded " that was not to the " Honer and 
Praise " of God. 

In the outer room is her portrait, painted in her 
teens, about the time she became Dauphiness of 
France, and before craft or misfortune had marred her 
face. It satisfies one's ideal of the woman whose love- 
liness melted even the heart of her executioner, so that 
he wished to kiss her hand before he did his horrible 



A, WOMAN'S VACATION. 29 

office. Her portraits vary in everything except the 
arched eyebrows; but this one is said to be genuine. 

Scott has drawn her picture in the Abbot with 
the pencil of a lover. " That brow, so truly open and 
regal — those eyebrows, so regularly graceful, which 
yet were saved from the charge of regular insipidity 
by the beautiful effect of the hazel eyes, w^hich they 
overarched, and which seem to utter a thousand his- 
tories — the nose with all its Grecian precision of out- 
line — the mouth, so sweetly formed, as if designed to 
speak nothing but what was delightful to hear — the 
dimpled chin — the stately swan-like neck, form a 
countenance the like of which we know not to have 
existed in any other character." 

The Scottish crown jewels are but a modest show of 
gold and precious stones, but so dear to the Scottish 
heart, that for many years after the union of the tw^o 
kingdoms they were hidden away, by the cunning of 
women, sometimes in the cellar of a church, and oftener 
in a double-bottomed bed, lest the English should car- 
ry them off. 

They lay for a hundred years in a dusty old oaken 
chest in the Castle, -where they were discovered by 
Sir Walter Scott at last, and shown without fee, by his 
advice. Lockhart tells, in his life, how his loyal soul 
was stirred in its depths when the old regalia came 
again to light. The sceptre was last used when James 
united Scotland and England, and' the English chan- 
cellor laid it down with the scornful Scotch proverb, 
"There's an end of an auld sang." 

Scottish history is rich in brave women, as they were 
rich in brave sons. It was a noble Countess of Buchan 



30 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

who claimed her husband's right, in his absence, to 
crown Robert Bruce, for which high crime and mis- 
demeanor she was hung up in an iron cage outside the 
walls of Stirling Castle ; but nothing of that kind ever 
kills a woman. She lived to see Robert Bruce enjoy 
his own again, in spite of her enemies and his. 

In the Royal Institution is Jenny Geddes's stool, 
the identical one which she threw at the head of the 
prelate in St. Giles's^ Church, when he tried to read the 
collect. 

"CoZ/c, said ye? The deil colic the wame [stomach] 
of ye! Would ye read mass at ray ear?" This was 
the signal for the final uprising of the Scotch against 
the Established church, which the English were trying 
to force upon them. 

Near the stool is the plain box of a pulpit from St. 
Giles's Church, in which John Knox used to preach so 
vigorously, that '-he was like to ding the pulpit in 
splinters, and fiee out of it." 

In the same room is the "Maiden," the Scottish 
guillotine, in which a sharpened wedge-like stone, 
attached to a cord, serves for an axe. This stone was 
wet with the blood of Montrose, and of many solemn 
" Covenanters." 

The " Covenant," which never could have existed out 
of Scotland, was laid on a tombstone in Grey Friars 
churchyard to be signed, and many used their own 
blood for ink. It was a true sign of the blood shed 
like water which was to follow. 

The Edinburgh mob has always been a fierce one, 
with a deadly grasp on its rights. One of the charac- 
ters in the Heart of Mid Lothian expresses its feeling. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 31 

"When we had a king and a chancellor and parlia- 
ment men of our ain, we could e'en peeble them with 
stanes, when they were na good bairns — but naebody's 
nails can reach the length of Lunnon." 

The hanging of Porteous in the Grassraarket by the 
Edinburgh mob so enraged Queen Caroline of England, 
when she heard of it, that she threatened to make Scot- 
land a hunting-ground. 

The famous Duke of Argyle, dear to Scottish hearts, 
replied with a deep bow, that in that case he must take 
leave of her majesty and go down into his own coun- 
try, to get his hounds ready. It was the same Duke 
of Argyle who befriended Jeanie Deans. 

No one has seen Edinburgh truly who does not drive 
through the Canongate, the once aristocratic street of 
the city, built up by the nobility, when the Stewarts 
were in their glory. Everything was done there that 
makes Scotland classic. It is now crowded with the 
poorest of the poor, and full of ancient and fish-like 
smells. To Scott, it was full of ghosts, and he chal- 
lenged every one to stand and deliver his story. 
Lockhart says that "nq funeral hearse crept slower up 
the Canongate than Scott's landau." 

John Knox's house stands there still, full of gables 
and diamond-paned windows. The inscription over 
the door is, "Lufe-God-abafe-al-and-yi-nychbor-as-yi- 
self." One thinks of him in his black cap, striding out 
of that house, boiling with righteous wrath, to preach 
against the " Monstrous Regimen of Women." Many 
men, since his time, have wasted their breath in that 
vain crusade, and to less purpose. When Queen Mary 
sent for him, hoping to moderate his zeal against her 



32 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

by the sight of her charms, if he had the spirit of a 
man in him, he " knocked so hard against the beautiful 
queen's heart, that she often wept bitterly." He had 
the spirit of God in him, over which her bhmdish- 
ments had no power; but the "Monstrous Regimen of 
Women " hath continued unto this present, and the 
end of it is not yet. 

A noble feature of Edinburgh is its ancient charity 
schools, called hospitals. Chief of these is "Heriot's," 
for the children of the city; and so well has it been 
managed by the magistrates as trustees, that the fund 
now supports a great number of free schools all over 
the city, as well as the hospital itself. 

George Heriot was the famous goldsmith of James 
I.'s time,, whom Scott puts bodily into the Fortunes 
of Nigel. James I. asked him what was the use of 
laying up money when he had no heirs, and he replied 
that he could never lack heirs while there were orphan 
children in Edinburgh. 

Another of these hospitals provides generously, as 
our guide expressed it, for "poor gentlemen's sons 
through no fault of their own." 

I suppose no man would ever be the son of a poor 
gentleman through any fault of his own. 

The "National Gallery" is just large enough to give 
pleasure without fatigue. It is enough of a good 
thing; another picture would crowd it. The crown 
of it is a portrait of Mrs. Grahame by Gainsborough, 
pure and proud enough to have only the blue Douglas 
blood in her veins. It proves that all women are not 
born free and equal, if men are. 

The quarrel and reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 83 

by Sir Noel Paton, the Scotch painter, who cannot be 
enticed away from Edinburgh by any bribe, are pic- 
tures to hang themselves in every memory, as well as 
two fair-haired girls, by Grcuze, intensely kissable, like 
all faces of his painting. In a picture of Francesca da 
Rimini and her lover, reading the book which tempted 
them, is a kiss that makes one's cheek warm and thrill 
for sympathy. The jealous husband creeping into the 
background is a blemish, suggesting sin, when in the 
picture and in the story there is, so far as it goes, noth- 
ina: but innocence. 

Ary Schoeffer has painted the afteitjlap of this pic- 
ture, as Dante saw these same lovers floating always 
together through his Inferno, and Francesca tells him 
that — 
" A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things." 

A ^ise man said it, and perhaps it is true ; but it 
seems to me it would be a greater sorrow yet never to 
. have had any happy things to remember. An agony 
is better than emptiness. 

In this gallery is the only authentic portrait of 
Burns, with the soft but brilliant black eyes, melting 
and fiery at once, which distinguished his otherwise 
ordinary face. 

Burns is perhaps dearer to the Scottish heart than 
even Scott, on the principle of mothers always loving 
the wayward son best. 

"That is Robert Burns, the poet," said the custodian 
of the gallery to me ; " perhaps you have heard of him?" 

" It seems to me I have seen the name before," I 
said. " Was he anything but a poet ? " 
3 



34 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

"T should think that was enough for one man," he 
replied, and left ine with scorn in his eyes. 

Can it be possible that most of the Americans whom 
he meets in that gallery have not heard of Robert 
Burns? That was my painful inference. 

In every place where a portrait can hang in Edin- 
burgh you find the face of that James who joined 
England and Scotland in an unwilling marriage, after 
a long and stormy courtship. Nothing but royal blood 
could possibly excuse the uncouth face and awkward 
figure of this only son of a beautiful mother. His legs 
were so weak that he could not stand at seven years 
of age, and through life he was always leaning on 
men's shoulders. If he had not been a king, no shoul- 
der would liave consented to hold him up. The de- 
scendant of warriors, he must needs pad himself with 
a dress so thickly quilted as to be dagger proof, and he 
trembled at a drawn sword. His mind was thoroughly 
cultivated, but to so little purpose that Sully called 
him the "wisest fool in Europe." The Stewarts were 
great in love, in war, and in beauty, but the most un- 
luckv race that ever reiscned. Of them all, James I. 
had good fortune, and nothing else. 

To walk the streets of* Edinburgh reading the signs, 
is like turning over the pages of the Waverley novels. 
Some great names have come wofully down in the 
world, such as Robert Bruce, Plasterer, John Knox, 
Baker, or James Stewart, Mercer. I praised the city 
to one of the Stewarts, and he said, "Yes, a fine city, 
with mighty little money in it. * A penniless lass with 
a long pedigree." " 

No one should turn his back on the " Land o' Cakes " 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 35 

without tasting the porridge and oat cake that make 
the principal food of the country people. One must be 
born to the cakes to like them. They taste and look 
most like the dry yeast cakes that we use at home for 
raising bread. It comes naturally to the Scotch tongue 
to speak of porridge in the plural, as "they are too 
hot," or " I will take a few porridge." Another Scotch 
dainty is a sort of marmalade, which could not be more 
bitter if an old feud had been stirred into it. 

Dr. Johnson defined oatmeal as a kind of grain 
used to feed horses in England and men in Scotland. 
An old Scotch nobleman agreed to it, and asked where 
one could find such horses or such men. Sydney 
Smith said, many years ago, that it took a surgical 
operation to get a joke into a Scotchman's head ; and 
not until a recent anniversary of Scott's birth did it 
occur to a Scotchman to say that he must have meant 
an English joke. If a wit throws down the gauntlet 
to Scotland, he had better keep his portcullis down 
and his drawbridge up forevermore, for the enemy is 
slow, but sure. A diet of oatmeal, through all the 
ages, must sharpen both the nose and temper of a 
nation. The Scotch would always rather fight than 
eat, and oatmeal is at the bottom of it. 

" O, thus it was they loved them dear, 
And sought how to requite 'em ; 
And having no friends left but they, 
They did resolve to fight 'em." 

After reading Hawthorne's exhaustive description of 
the Burns's country and relics, there is not much use 
in going over the journey, except to say that you have 



^ 



36 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

been there, and as Chesterfield told his son, " you can 
say that just as well without going." 

The excursion to the Trosachs (bristled country) 
may be made from Edinburgh and return in a day, but 
it is too hasty for comfort. The shortest time con- 
sistent with enjoyment is three days. The Trosachs 
were almost an unknown country until Scott planted 
his verses all over it. 

If you have but a few days to give to Scotland, 
Edinburgh deserves them all. If you want to get at 
the heart of a country, you will find it most surely in 
its capital city. Alexander Smith, the Scotch poet, 
whose youth promised so much more than his matu- 
rity performed, describes Edinburgh as a lover his 
mistress. 

"It is a reposeful place, because it has done enough. 
Its distinction has not to be created or kept up. It is 
an education in itself. Its beauty refines one like being 
in love. It is perennial, like a play of Shakspeare's : 
'Nothing can stale its infinite variety.' London is the 
stomach of the empire, Edinburgh its subtle and far- 
darting brain. It is a Weimar without its Goethe, a 
Boston without its nasal twang." 

In our last Scotch twilight, which, in the month of 
June, lasts until ten o'clock, we walk down Princes 
Street and say "more last words" to Scott's monu- 
ment, which looks as if the lovely fretted spire of 
some Gothic church had been lifted off the roof and 
plnced over his statue. 

If ever we find a year lying about loose, in our lives, 
with no work laid out for it, we will spend it in Edin- 
burgh, and educate ourselves up to oatmeal. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 37 



CHAPTER III. 

SCOTLAND. 

"Up the craggy mountain, 

And down the mossy glen, 
We canna gang a milking 
For Charlie and his men." 

*' Then view St. David's ruined pile, 
And home returning, soothly swear 
Was never scene so sad and fair." 

T the " George Inn," in Melrose, the landlady, 
who must have been the sweetest of Scotch las- 
sies in her youth, gives one such a welcome as in our 
country we keep for relatives who are rich and child- 
less. It may be set down in the bill, but it is worth 
the money. 

Abbotsford is three or four miles away, on a well- 
travelled road. Every reader of Lockh art's Life of 
Scott, in seven volumes, has helped to build this " ro- 
mance in stone," at least with sym})athy. One has al- 
most seen Sir Walter, when one has seen the house 
that he built out of his own head. Looking only at 
the house, what a head it must have been! The place 
has fallen at last to Mary Monica Hope-Scott, a great- 




38 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

granddaughter of Scott, through that daughter Sophia, 
who married Lockhart. And this is the end of that 
fine Scott family which Sir Walter hoped to found, 
with a yearning that was like a thirst for intensity ! — • 
a family that should " cock up its beaver" at Abbots- 
ford forever and ever, in memory of him. 

Miss Hope-Scott must be more Hope than Scott, 
since she wishes to shut up the place, and keep it 
wholly to herself. She is the unwilling keeper of the 
sacred " Black Stone " in this Mecca of tourists, and 
goes away in disgust to Edinburgh when the travelling 
season begins. 

Visitors are admitted through a back gate and nar- 
row stairs, which belittle the approach to the house, 
and give an unfortunate first impression of its beauty. 

Mr. Hope-Scott added a wing for the use of his own 
family, thus yielding up to Sir Walter's pilgrims all 
the rooms in which he had lived and written. 

The highest interest hangs about the plain little 
study, with a gallery and a little staircase, down which 
he used to steal from his bedroom, after he had " sim- 
mered " his chapters in his head during the hours of 
dawn. 

It was this habit of severe morning labor which en- 
abled him to keep up the Waverley mystery so many 
years; his visitors, whose name was legion, could not 
believe that the man whom they saw nearly all day 
and evening was the writer of two or three novels a 
year. 

An Oxford scholar even wrote a book to prove that 
the "Great Unknown" was really Sir Walter Scott, 
and no other. He also proved, I think, that Oxford 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 39 

scholars Lave more time on their hands than they know 
what to do with, then as now. 

Sir Walter was bred to Scottish law, and wrote little 
before he was thirty. In his office of sheriff he sconred 
Scottish country thoroughly. These were the years in 
which, as one of his old friends expressed it, " he was 
makin' himsel'." He said of his profession what Slen- 
der said of his intimacy with Mistress Anne Page: 
"There was no great love between us at the beginning, 
and it pleased Heaven to decrease it on further acquaint- 
ance; " but it gave him the habit of steady application, 
which is a power of itself in the world, whether genius 
is tacked to it or not. 

In this study, full of "small old volumes, dark with 
tarnished gold," the best of the Waverley novels were 
written; and here the last clothes that he wore, and 
his walking-sticks, are kept; a little tower-room leading 
oujt of it contains only a bronze cast of his head, taken 
after death — a two-storied brain-house, with a swell 
front and deep-set windows. 

The study opens into the show-library — not a work- 
ing-room at all, but rich in carving, and statues, and 
things curious as well as beautiful, in which its own- 
er delighted. 

A hollow table, glass-covered, holds the gold snuff- 
boxes and jewelled daggers and miniatures, sent to 
Scott by other famous people. 

Here is the furniture presented to him by George 
IV., first snob in Europe, whom his loyal spirit must 
needs reverence, because he was an anointed king. 

In the drawing-room are portraits of that comfort- 
able old lady, Sir Walter's mother, who does not ap- 



40 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

pear to have been the source of her son's genius, and 
of his wife, a handsome, but dissatisfied-looking woman. 
Lockhart says no more about her in tlie " Life " than 
he can help saying ; but no one expects a very glowing 
description,' from any author, of his mother-in-law. 
Some of the journals kejDt by her visitors call her " an 
insignificant little French woman;" but the journal of 
her husband, kept through many of his best years, shows 
that he loved her heartily while she lived, and mourned 
her sorrowfully when she died. A woman may be 
said to have a successful career if she pleases her hus- 
band all her life ; she would be more than mortal if 
she satisfied his friends. 

Scott fell in love, in his youth, with a lady of higher 
rank than his own, like Quentin Durward and others 
of his heroes, but, unlike them, he was soon and bit- 
terly disappointed. He took it bravely, as he took all 
outrageous blows of fortune, and said of himself long 
after, ^' Broken-hearted for two years, my heart hand- 
'somely pieced again, but the crack will remain till my 
dying day." 

I think no woman deserved to be called " insignifi- 
cant" who could "handsomely piece" a heart like his. 
It was scornfully said, too, that she loved to be called 
Lady Scott; but there are few women so strong-minded 
that a title would not lay a flattering unction to their 
souls. 

The famous picture of Queen Mary's head, after exe- 
cution, painted by one Cawood, hangs in the drawing- 
room, and has a weird, sorrowful beauty about it, but 
it is so toned down as to have nothing ghastly to the 
eyes, like the head of John the Baptist, passed round 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 41 

in platters, in so many pictures. The dining-room is 
only shown to visitors when Miss Plope-Scott is away. 
It is hung with, family j)ortraits; one of a lovely cousin, 
called the "Flower of Yarrow," and another of Beardie 
Scott, an ancestor, who would never cut his beard 
after Charles I. was beheaded. It was a queer old 
fashion to wear long hair for mourning. Scott had his 
bed moved into this room in his last days, that he 
might listen to the ripple of the beloved Tweed, which 
flowed gently past the windows. 

He had drank deep of riches, and honor, and wisdom, 
but his last words to Lockhart were, "Be good, my 
dear" 

The walls of Abbotsford are lined inside and out 
with quaint reminders of Scotch history and heroism — 
the money-box of Queen Mary, which could never have 
had much money in it, in the best of her fortunes; 
the purse of Rob Roy, that had a pistol in the clasp; 
and many old suits of armor, which bear the dent of 
good English blows, the soi-t that the Scotch were ever 
fond of. A bust of Wordsworth refines the hall, which 
woiTld otherwise be all Scotch. It is told of Scott 
that when he visited that brother poet at Rydal Mount, 
he was forced to slip away privately, at least once a day, 
to some secluded inn, -where he sustained his inner man 
with more substantial food than sufficed for Words- 
worth's necessities. 

" He still went on refining, 

When others thought of dining.'* 

Among the other old iron in the hall at Abbotsford 
is the " branks," a sort of iron bridle, with a gag, 



42 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

which used to be fitted to the heads of incorrigible 
scolds, while they were led through the streets. A 
chivalrous old gentleman, who had joined our party, 
held up this rusty bit of old tyranny. 

" Time changes all things," he said ; " women never 
scold now." 

" No," said his degenerate son ; " they only have 
vieios" 

The guide hurried each party through the rooms at 
railroad speed, rattling off the story of each faster 
than a monk ever told his beads. Abbotsford saw 
much good company in its short day ; half England, 
and all Scotland, came to visit the most noted man of 
the age ; but it was never lighted, and its utmost beauty 
brought out from top to bottom, except once, when a 
ball was given to celebrate the marriage of the oldest 
son. Even then, the battalion of misfortunes was 
gathering, to break upon Sir Walter from every side, 
and no man ever took arms more bravely in a sea of 
troubles. 

Carlyle says, with his savage truthfulness, which cuts 
deeper than any lie, that "the works of Sir Walter 
Scott amused the world, but did nothing to amend it." 
He himself smiled at his ovfn " big, bow-wow style," 
as he called it ; but he put into his life all the conscience 
and simple.earnestness that were lacking in his books. 
When the publishing firm of which he was a member 
failed, he took all its debts, of more than half a mil- 
lion of dollars, and in four years coined two thirds of it 
out of his brain for the patient creditors, who had faith 
in him. He fought one of the great battles of peace, 
such as no man fought before or since, and deserved to 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 43 

wear the title that Kapoleon gave to Marshal Ney 
after the Russian campaign, " the bravest of the brave." 
He died in harness, dictating imaginary conversation 
for new heroes, after his faithful brain had failed him. 
He had the old-fashioned virtue of loyalty to church 
and state, and could never be brought to believe that 
all men are born free and equal ; but he did certainly 
amend this world by living honestly and nobly in it all 
his days. . He is burieii in Dryburgh Abbey, in St. 
Mary's aisle, a ruin five or six miles from Melrose, in a 
direction opposite to Abbotsford. It is beautiful for 
situation, with just roof enough left to cover the few 
graves that have privilege there. 

Sir Walter lies between his wife and his eldest son, 
second and last baronet of the name, that well beloved 
son, six feet and four inches high, officer in a splendid 
hussar regiment, who was to found a long line of hon- 
orable Scotts, and on whose probable children Abbots- 
ford was settled on his marriage. 

These "probable children," like many others men- 
tioned in aristoci*atic deeds and settlements, never ex- 
isted, except on paper ; and the only remaining son died 
unmarried. 

The childless wife of the elder son is still living, but 
never comes to Abbotsford, having no claim upon it, 
since she failed to provide an owner. The heathen 
wives of India, when they lack children, prostrate 
themselves before the idol of Life and Death, and be- 
seech him continually, with flowei*s and baths of holy 
water, to grant their desire. One tall image of Shiva, 
near Calcutta, has been nearly washed away by the 
devotion of women. ' I suppose their rich and titled 



44 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

sisters in Great Britain have often prayed like thera, 
with tears and groanings that could not be uttered, for 
the " blessing of the poor." I cannot imagine a more 
gnawing pain for a woman, both good and proud, than 
to see an old title and a s|)lendid inheritance pass to 
some far-away cousin, because Heaven has denied her 
children. 

The bare walls of one or two rooms in old Pryburgh 
remain standing, the chapel and refectory; and a great 
rose window hung with ivy, more lovely in its last es- 
tate than when it bloomed with stained glass, and cast 
many-colored reflections in red, and yellow, and purple 
on the shaven crowns of the monks. 

The dungeon for restive brethren, who must some- 
times have been bored to death with paternosters and 
fasting, is shown, with the holes for forcing in their 
hands. It is to be hoped that the ingenious brother 
who contrived this mode of torture had a chance to 
try it for himself before he left this sinful world. A 
modern story hangs like another cobweb to the wall of 
this dungeon. A young woman, who bore traces of 
great beauty, inhabited it for several years, coming out 
only at night in search of food. She had made a vow 
never to look upon the sun, and was found dead in her 
cell at last. No one knew whence she came, or what 
had turned her head ; but the wortliy souls who kept 
her li'om starving thought that she had a disappoint- 
ment. "Men have died, and worms have eaten them, 
but not for love," said one who knew whereof he spoke ; 
but he never meant it to apply to women. 

They show you at Dryburgh a yew tree, seven hun- 
dred years old, which must remember the monks whea 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 45 

they were seeing their better days ; it keeps their 
secrets well, aud if the guide had said it was seven thou- 
sand years old, I know not how we could have dis- 
puted him. 

The village of Melrose clusters closely about its 
own abbey, which would be absolutely perfect as a 
ruin but for the remaining wall of a Presbyterian 
church, which was built within it. 

The old Catholic images of the Virgin and St. Brid- 
get have just noses enough left to turn up at this dese- 
cration. The stout heart of Robert Bruce is buried 
thei-e, and what there was left of the Black Douglas, 
ailer all his raids, as well as the whole body of Michael 
Scott,— 

*' A wizard of such dreaded fame, 
That when in Salamanca"s cave 
' Him listed his magic wand to wave, 

The bells would ring in Notre Dame.* 

In the Lay of the Last Minstrel, William of Delo- 
raine is sent to open this same grave at midnight, and 
to take away the magical book which had taught the 
wizard all his tricks. Some old carvings, crumbling 
fast into dust, are still called by Catholic names, and 
remind us dimly of that pious King D;ivid of Scotland, 
sometimes called St. David, who endowed Melrose, and 
many other religious houses, so generously, that he was 
called "a sore saint for the crown." Nothino: remains 
of him but a broken head or two, high uj3 on the 
arches of the abbey. He had far better, for his feme, 
have written psalms, like the king he was named for; 
a poem outlasts many temples. 



46 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

A graveyard surrounds the old walls, where Scott's 
faithful old servants are buried; one of them — Tom 
Purdy by narne — did so outrage his patience, that he 
made up his mind to send him away. 

"I am afraid, Tom, that we must part," said Sir 
Walter, at last. 

" Where is your honor thinking of going ? " an- 
swered Tom, with such utter trust, that his master re- 
pented himself, and kept him twenty years. 

The guide remarked that the graveyard contained 
only modern graves, none earlier than 1620. 

When we remembered that the Pilgrim Fathers first 
set foot on Plymouth Rock, and Boston was a howling 
wilderness in that year, we veiled our faces, and felt 
that we Americans were indeed a modern people, hav- 
ing no roots to speak of anywhere. 

Next to Abbotsford in interest, and far beyond it in 
beauty, because Nature took a contract ages ago to 
beautify them, are the twin estates of Hawthornden 
and Roslyn. The traveller, who divides a day between 
them, hath great reward. If happily, poets were made, 
not born, the family of Drummond would all have been 
poets, by virtue of living, through a long pedigree, on 
the romantic estate of Hawthornden. Only one was 
born to it, however — Sir William Drummond, whose 
soul was so steeped in loyalty, that he could not even 
write of love, unless it were kingly love ; and when the 
news of the murder of Charles I. was broken suddenly 
to him, he died of the shock. Ilis picturesque old 
house, which seems as much at home in the landscape 
as any tree in the park, is perched on a high rock, like 
a bird's nest. Over against it is a glorious old syca- 



A WOMAN'S vacation; 47 

more, a tree of trees, christened the " Four Sisters," 
which sheltered the poet when his friend Ben Jonson 
walked all the way from London to visit him. Near 
the house there are curious caves dug out of the solid 
rock by men's hands, nobody knows when, in which 
the Bruce kept himself in hiding for three or four years 
at a time. It was a dear price to pay for being king, 
at last, of the poor realm of Scotland. His hacked 
and rusty old sword, four or five feet long, is still pre- 
served in the cave. There were giants in those days ! 
The old entrance to the caves was over a well, so that 
an unexpected visitor got a wet welcome. 

The River Esk makes a deep and precipitous ravine 
through the length of the estate. This was a fanious 
retreat for Covenanters when the red-coats were after 
them; and a projecting rock is shown where John 
Knox used to stand, and stay their souls with strong 
preaching. 

The path to Roslyn lies through a postern gate, up 
and down both sides of the ravine, sometimes running 
against a flight of rough steps, and again narrowing to 
a foot in width, the water on one side, and a sheer wall 
of rock, mossy and flower-flecked, on the other. 

The flowers are the blue-bells of Scotland, not un- 
Hke our hyacinth in shape, but of the color of summer 
sky ; the ground is snowy in spots, with the blossom 
of the wild onion only fair to see. 

The Esk is but a tame little brook in June, yet in 
some seasons it roars through its rocky prison to a very 
diflTerent tune. The path is slippery with springs, and 
a spice of danger adds the last touch to its beauty. 
The Esk dances into many of Scott's verses — 



48 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

" Sweet are the paths, O, passing sweet! 
By Esk's fair stream that run, 
O'er airy steep, through copsewood deep, 
Impervious to the sun." 

And when the young Lochinvar stole the fair Ellen 
from her father's house — 

*' He swam the Esk River, where ford there was none. 

' They have fleet steeds that follow,' quoth young Lochinvar." , 

The path brings us at last to Roslyn Chapel, a feast 
of Gothic carving. It was built in the fifteenth cen- 
tury (ask the guide-book if I am not right), by an 
ancient St. Clair (or Sinkler, as the Scotch call it), who 
bet his head with the king that his dogs "Helj)" 
and "Hold "would bring down a certain white deer 
that had escaped the hunters many times. In the 
moment of anotlier escape, he vowed to God to build 
a church for his glory ; and as he made this holy resolve, 
the dogs sprang on the deer, so that Lord Roslyn saved 
his head, and dainty Roslyn Chapel shows to this day 
what a tremendous value he set upon it. l!^ot many 
heads are worth such a price! The old lords were 
buried beneath it, in full suits of armor, as if even in 
death they could not rest unless they were ready for 
the fiojht. 

The '"Prentice's Pillar," "foliage-bound," differs from 
all the others in being twined from base to top with a 
thick but delicate wreath of leaves and flowers. 
There is a tragical story clinging around it, like an- 
other vine. The master-mason who built the chapel 
could not understand this part of the plan sent to him 
from Rome, and while he journeyed thither to study it, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 49 

with its author, one of his apprentices continued the 
work ; and on the master's return he was so filled with 
wrath and envy at sight of the exquisite pillar which 
had baflBled his own skill, that he killed the boy on the 
spot. 

Every square inch of the chapel is worthy of study, 
and has its own history. Much of the dainty elabo- 
ration seems wasted, but the masons and carvers 
of the middle ages did their work with equal pains- 
taking, whether men's eyes were ever to behold it or 
not. 

They carved lovely wreaths and crosses, and shut 
them up, without a sigh, in dark cellars, or hid them 
behind walls, because, according to their motto, "God 
saw everything." How would they cross themselves 
with holy horror at the stucco-work and sham architec- 
ture of this century ! 

In one small cap to an archway in Roslyn Chapel 
are people practising the seven cardinal virtues — feed- 
ing the hungry, clothing the naked, &c., — with St. Peter 
and his keys at the end, to let them all into heaven. 
On the reverse are examples of the seven deadly sins, 
with Satan coming out of a crocodile's mouth to gob- 
ble them up. 

One would not notice this small stone-treatise at all, 
if the guide did not point it out in the sing-song drawl 
invented by the father of all guides, for the torment 
of travellers. 

It was a tradition of Roslvn, that when one of the 
family was about to die, the chapel appeared enveloped 
in flames; and Scott has woven it into his ballad of 
" Fair Rosabelle." 
4 



50 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Service is held in it every Sunday, though the owner 
lives at Dysart House, thirty miles away. There are 
velvet cushions for his using, and plain boards for the 
"great unwashed." 

The chapel is kept in repair by the shilling fee ex- 
acted of every visitor; a perpetual shilling in the 
glove is the only talisman that carries one safe through 
the British empire. It levies a larger tax on our coun- 
try now than it ever could if we had remained its 
colony. 

We ate a very small lunch for a very large price at 
the Roslyn Hotel, and were then told by a vampire, 
who had been permitted to take the shape of a nian 
and a brother, that the railway station was "just 
round the corner." Now, the corner was half a mile 
away, and after we had turned it, the station fled be- 
fore us, as we devoured the way, for at least two miles 
more. 

We missed our train, of course, and nothing but 
utter exhaustion prevented our instant return to the 
hotel, and the putting to death of that unworthy Scots- 
man, without benefit of clergy. We cherish the hope 
that we may some time meet him in Boston, when we 
will straightway beguile him into the purlieus of Dock 
Square, swear to him that Niagara Falls are "just 
round the corner," and there leave him, in serene 
confidence that he will never find his way out in this 
life. 

Good society in Scotland is like that of England ; I 
suppose there is but one pattern for it among Saxon 
people; but the inhabitants of the cottages and the 
crowd on the city street are no more of one blood 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 51 

with the English thnn they were in the day? of the 
Border fights. The long, keen faces resemble the type 
of New England; they are disposed to question, rather 
than to afiirm ; their minds are cast in the subjunc- 
tive mood ; your coachman will say, " This is John 
Knox's house ; you might have heard of it. Eh ? " 

An intense curiosity leavens 'their nature; you may 
wander all day in English streets, and no one will give 
you a second look, scarcely a first one ; but in Scot- 
land the women will drop their first-born, and leave 
the porridge to burn, to run to their doors to look at a^ 
strangen 

The Scotch love old customs, such as keeping 
up the sanctuary for debtors about the precincts of 
Holyrood (there is a certain stone in the Canon- 
gate that marks, the limit; and if the fleeing debtor 
passes that line, he is safe from the sheriff) ; but 
they will suffer a slight chang'e in their ways, if, after 
a hundred or two years of consideration, they per- 
ceive that it will tend to their interest. Not even 
this motive seems to reconcile the Ens^lish to a new 
wrinkle in the everlasting face of things. 

The Scotch themselves would probably be the last , 
to claim any affinity with Americans, though they have 
ample chance to study them. 

In the month of June four thousand travelling 
Americans had already passed through Edinburgh — an 
army which pays well for its own ravages. 

Carriage hire is the one cheap thing in Scotland ; 
an open carriage for four will take you up hill and 
down for seventy-five cents an hour; but before the 
next American invoice of four thousand souls shall 



52 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

reach them, they will doubtless have amended the 
matter. 

In the old days of Scotland, it was no disgrace, 
and scarcely an inconvenience, to be poor; to them', 
learning was most excellent, and students begged 
their education from door to door, thinking no shame. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 53 



CHAPTER IV. 

FEOM EDINBURGH TO LONDON". 
"Every Englishman is an island." — Novalis. 

EVERY village between Edinburgh and London 
tempts one to leave the train, and make it a 
study. The cottages of the English poor may be 
damp, unwholesome, poverty-stricken holes, more fit 
for the burrows of rabbits than for the homes of hu- 
manity; but at a distance, their thatched roofs and gray 
walls make a continual gallery of pictures. One looks 
in vain for the pert white cottages with green blinds, 
which, in America, defy the landscape, but insure health 
and cleanliness to the inmates. 

The villasre churches date back to the monkish times, 
in many instances, and look down on all around them 
with such superior beauty, that the first impression is 
of a devout community giving all their possessions to 
make glorious their tabernacle, like the Jews in the 
wilderness, content to live from hand to mouth if only 
their God be well served. 

We chose York for our half-way house for the sake 
of its cathedral — an epic poem in stone, too cold and 
perfect for love, but filling the measure of admiration 



e 



54 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

to the brim. One would be more homesick for the 
broken and homely arches of Chester, but Yorkshire- 
men may boast forever of the loveliness of their min- 
ster; human nature seems always to love best that 
which is like itself, not too perfect. 

It is easy to say that York Minster is five hundred 
and twenty-four feet long, or that in the year 669 glass 
was first put in the windows that birds might no longer 
fly in and out, and defile the sanctuary — one may meas- 
ure but not describe it. It traces its glorious propor- 
tions on the memory like the images of a solemn and 
stately dream, that would fall down and break in the 
telling. There is an inscrijDtion somewhere on its walls 
that expresses it :. — 

*' As is the rose the flower of flowers, 
So of houses is this of ours." 

Ruskin calls some parts of it "confectioners' Gothic;" 
but one can only hope that Ruskin's case may be tried 
in the next world, if not in this, by a jury of artists and 
master-masons. 

The music of the boy-choir is soul -satisfying, but all 
the spoken part of the service might as well be the 
rattling of dry bones, the sound is so completely 
muddled by echoes. The great cathedrals are houses 
for praise and prayer, not for preaching. 

On our way out of church, one of the seven pil- 
grims, who saunter through this book with me, was 
suddenly transfixed under the central tower, possessed 
with its beauty ; there she stood with head tipped 
back, and her face lightened with the same look that 
it will wear when she sees the pearly gates. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 55 

Beauty is meat and drink to her, and she might be 
standing there now but for a black-robed vei-ger (to 
whom the central tower was an every-day aftair), vvho^ 
led her gently, but firmly, to the door, and shut her out 
of her paradise. 

There is still a well-preserved tomb to the little son 
of Edward III. and Philippa, who gave five marks and 
five nobles a year, forever, to purchase prayers for his 
soul. They have ceased to pray for his soul, if they 
ever did it, but the sum is still paid to the dean and 
chapter. In England, a thousand years are as one 
day. 

The archbishop's palace is a little out of town, but 
the deanery is beautiful enough for a prince. 

An English clergyman holding a high office in a 
cathedral, after inducting four sons into fat livings, is 
said to have quoted the verse, " As for me and my 
house, we will serve the Lord." Nothing in all Eng- 
land so probed Hawthorne's vein of satire as the luxury 
of its clergy. "Every cathedral-close in turn has seemed 
to me the loveliest, cosiest, safest, least wind-shaken, and 
most enjoyable shelter that ever the thrift and selfish- 
ness of mortal man contrived for himself. How de- 
lightful to combine all this with the service of the 
temple ! " 

A cultivated Englishman said to me of Our Old 
Home, "I know that Hawthorne received constant 
kindness and admiration in England; but if he had 
been insulted and trampled on every day of his life by 
Englishmen, he could not have written a bitterer book 
about us." 

The walls of York are broken and battered to the 



66 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

ground, in many places, more by war than time, but 
what there is left of them is religiously preserved. In 
the wars of the Roses, the head of a Duke of York, 
with a paper crown on it, was fixed to one of the gates 
that "York might overlook the town of York." Coney 
street is the finest street of York, formerly " Conynge," 
the old Saxon word for hing^ meaning "the man who 
can ;" the word and the meaning are equally corrupted 
in these latter days, for the king is more often than not 
the man who can't. • 

In a long, vagabond walk about the city, we stumbled 
on the old church of St. Cuthbert, founded in 1066, 
soon after the coming over of William the Conqueror. 
The oaken doors are black as the nails that stud them, 
and the pathway to the entrance is paved thick with 
gravestones, as if the bodies beneath had not lost inter- 
est in the church-goers that followed them. 

The people of York, like other city people, have their 
angles of temper and dialect well rubbed off, but the 
country side of Yorkshire has a language almost unin- 
telligible in London. 

For looks, Robert Collyer says that the men of his 
shire resemble him in square solidity of frame, and for 
character, Charlotte Bronte has carved out a type in 
her books, which is acknowledged to be perfect. 

In her part of the shire, the barren moors make all 
the landscape purple with heather ; and so poor is the 
region about Haworth, where she lived, that it has 
come to be a proverb in Yorkshire, when one knows 
not which way to turn for poverty, " You must do as 
they do in Haworth — do as you can." Poverty has 
so hardened their hearts and sharpened their wits, that 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 57 



■> 



no one can overreach them in a bargain ; and so tena- 
cious are they of old grudges that they " will carry a 
&tone in their pockets seven years, then turn it, carry it 
seven years more, and throw it at last." 

We were in hot haste to reach London before "the 
season" should be over. It comes to an end about the 
first of July, with the closing of Parliament, and every 
one who has a house of his own, or an invitation from 
a friend, goes into tlie country. According to fashion- 
able novels, London is empty; but it is no more emp- 
ty tlmn a panful of milk after the cream has been 
skimmed off. 

You can see the old churches, and palaces, and by- 
ways at any time, — 

• *' You never tread upon them but you set 
Your foot upon some ancient history, — 

but in driving up and down Rotten Row in Hyde Park, 
you see the people who make history. 

Thousands of carriages, plain or coroheted, move 
slowly up and down the Row, from the gates to the 
" Albert Memorial," one of the most tremendous tomb- 
stones ever raised by a disconsolate widow to the dear 
departed. At each corner of the foundation are co- 
lossal groups representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
America; then four broad flights of steps close around 
a marble pedestal, carved in very high relief, with fig- 
ures of all the most famous men in literature and art. 
Above them is the sitting statue of Prince Albert of 
Saxe Cobourg, and over all is a pointed stone canopy 
rising high in air, and glittering as pounds sterling 



& 



58 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

could make it, with gilding and brilliant/ colors. It is 
a barbaric feast to the eye; the only discrepancy about 
it is Prince Albert himself; perched up above all the 
nobility of talent, he has the effect of an anti-climax. 
It is like one of the Pharaohs building a pyramid in 
which to bury a sacred cow. If there were to be so 
noble a monument to English wealth and pride, it 
would seem that English history could afford a more 
fiimous name to crown it than that of a handsome Ger- 
man princeling, who had the luck to marry a queen, to 
beget nine heirs to the throne, and to amuse liimself 
with literature and art, when the jealous commons left 
him nothing else to do. 

Authors need no princely patrons in these days; that 
occupation is gone from rich people. 

A hundred years hence, when an English child looks 
at this "Memorial," and insists on knowing what Prince 
Albert was famous for, the only answer can be, that he 
^won the love of the richest woman in England. 

The carriages that crowd the Row between five and 
seven in the afternoon are usually occupied by dowagers, 
jvith now and then a pretty girl on the front seat ; but 
most of the young people are on horseback, in the ring 
fenced in for them. Every woman looks well in a rid- 
ing habit if there is any prettiness possible to her; but 
the dowagers, the heavy artillery of English society, 
are nearly always built as Hawthorne j^ainted them 
with his coarsest brush. "She has an awful ponder- 
osity of frame. . . . When she walks, her advance is 
elephantine. When she sits down, it is on a great 
round space of her Maker's footstool, where she looks 
as if nothing could ever move her." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 59 

Light silks and rich laces, and what would bo called 
" opera bonnets " in America, are the rule for this after- 
noon drive ; yet a thoroughly well-dressed woman in 
the Park is rare as the phosnix among birds, for we 
sought her with labor and pains. To American eyes, 
everything is of last year's fashion ; the material is rich 
and costly enough in itself, but the effect is as if not 
one Englishwoman in a hundred had ever seen herself 
from head to foot in a mirror. 

Evidently taste and style, which mould a costume, 
however varied, into an harmonious whole, are not to 
be bought for English money. In such matters, pounds, 
shillings, and pence are not legal tender. M. Taine, in 
his visit to England, wondered and grew sad over this 
lamentable English blindness to the fitness of things 
in dress. One lady assured him that all her dresses 
came direct from Paris, and his dreadful comment was, 
that she must have selected them herself. 

The women of the middle and lower classes, whom 
one meets in shops and picture galleries, are so many 
walking hat-racks on which different articles of dress 
are loosely hung without any relation to each other or 
to the season. 

The fair-haired, broad-chested Englishman is much 
handsomer than the same type appearing in women ; 
what is large and noble in a man's form and face be- 
comes coarse and repulsive in a woman. 

Beautiful stuffs become con-upted in English wearing, 
as fine names suffer a sort of "sea change" in English 
speech; this drive called Rotten Row was once the 
"Route de Roi" (the king's way) ; Charing Cross was 
the Cross of Chere Reine, the last halting-place of the 



60 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

funeral of Eleanor of Castile before her body reached 
Westminster Abbey; Greenwich is Grinnidge; Har- 
wich, Harritch; Bohun, Boon ; Beauchamp, Beecham ; 
and, worst of all, Cholmondely, Churaley. The Eng- 
lishman never hurries except in pronouncing proper 
names. 

We christened the prettiest of the ladies moving 
slowly past us by the names that Thackeray and Trol- 
lope have made familiar; not one was noble enough 
for Ethel Newcome, or coldly beautiful enough for 
Lady Dumbello, but it was easy to identify Lady Glen- 
cora Palliser, and Lily Dale looking up and down the 
Park for the faithless Crosby. 

When the plot was thickest, there was a sort of mur- 
mur in the crowd, and policemen scattered the car- 
riages right and left to make way for "the princess." 
The liveries of the footmen were faced with scarlet; 
otherwise there was nothing to distinguish the equipage 
of royalty. The Princess of Wales and her sister, 
wife of the Russian Czarovitch, occupied the carriage 
alone. The princess sat very upright, looking right 
and left with an unvarying smile. She has the same 
fair and sweet expression which is familiar in all her 
pictures, but she has faded terribly since she came to 
England, 

" Blissful bride of a blissful heir." 

I fear it soon dawned upon her that these two "bliss- 
fuls" were only a poetical license. She looks like a 
woman trained in every hair and muscle to bear the 
gaze of strangers, and "to smile, and smile," whether 
her heart were light or heavy. 



A WOMAN'S vacation: 61 

A woman may take some comfort in being a princess, 
because she can set the fashions, and become the mother 
of kings; but, on the other hand, she can seldom marry 
her true-love, or have her own way in the training of 
her children; she can never prefer her friends to honor, 
or give a hearty snub to her enemies, for fear of losing 
her popularity. After all, I think, if women had their 
choice of position in the world before they entered it, 
the princess-ships would go a-begging. Alexandra wore 
a suit of light-brown silk, embroidered with flowers of 
a darker shade, and a small hat with a long, light-blue 
feathisr. She was the best dressed woman in the Park, 
but not so young or so pretty as her sister Dagmar, 
who was then on a visit to England with her Russian 
husband. These two lovely sisters, who grew up to- 
gether in the modest little court of Denmark, will 
come to high preferment on the thrones of England 
and Russia. They may be 

*' Perfect women, nobly planned," 

but it was their prettiness that did it. Beauty is but 
skin deep, and handsome is that handsome does, but 
fair faces will sit on thrones while men have the 
choosing. 

It is a pretty custom to relieve the gloom of Lon- 
don streets with a row of bright-colored tiles across the 
windows filled with flowers in bloom; and flowers 
always rush into blossom in English air, as if they loved 
to do it and scorned to be coaxed. 

Another lively feature is the continual emblazonment 
of the queen's arms over the shop doors — "The lion 



62 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

and the uDicorn fighting for the crown." Shopping in 
London lets patience have its perfect work. Each 
article is put away after inspection, and often tied up 
in a bundle with a Gordian knot, before another is 
shown. The idea seems to be that *' time was made for 
slaves," and free-born Britons have no need to save it. 
"There's another day coming" should be the motto of 
the Enoflish arms : " Dieu et raon droit " is obsolete. 

One knows at once that an Englishman's house is 
his castle, when he sees that the hall doors have no 
handles on the outside. No one can enter without 
giving a previous signal ; London neighbors cannot 
"run in." When I first laid my hand on the spot 
where the handle ought to be, in any Christian door, 
and found only a blank, I stared at it as if it had 
played me a trick of magic; but one soon finds out 
that door-handles are not necessary to comfort, nor 
door-plates either, which are found only on those 
houses in which some business or profession is carried 
on. It is just as easy^ too, to pull a spike in the fence 
as a regular bell-handle, when you have learned the 
trick of it. 

Perhaps July is the month when London may best 
sit for its photograph; then, if ever, it wears the happy 
expression. After months of rain comes the "clear 
shining" that is so delicious in moist climates. 

The dingy old markets turn poetical with moss-rose 
buds and scarlet mountains of strawberries. The latter 
are never sold in boxes, only fair on top and a snare 
and delusion beneath, but they are sc'ooped up by the 
pound into paper bags, which never blush for their con- 
tents. One makes two bites of a strawberry in Eng- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 63 

lanci; each one is big, crisp, and self-contained. It is 
the custom to serve them in their own hulls; and when 
eaten, each one is held by its stem, and dipped sepa- 
rately in sugar and cream, as it deserves. It is a lei- 
surely, genial way of doing them justice, only second 
to picking them off a hill-side. It makes one glad that 
fingers were made before spoons. 

A favorite resort for Americans in London is the ^ 
Langham Hotel, near to Regent Street and the best 
beloved shops; there you will meet your best friend 
and your mortal enemy, if anywhere; but the gathering 
of our tribes is so great that one must almost coin one's 
self into shillings to secure good attendance. There is 
a legion of other places in London where Americans 
can be at home for much less money, if it were not for ^ 
that harrowing dread, which doth most easily beset us, 
of being thought poor. 

Since everybody went to Europe last summer, it did 
not surprise me that "-the Professor" should be there ^ 
too. He had swept Ireland, and Scotland, and Eng- 
land with a new broom. "But in all my going up and 
down the earth," he said, " nothing surprises me more 
than the perpetual appearance of American ladies trav- ^ 
elling alone in all places of interest. From the heights 
of old Londonderry to the vaults of St. Peter's, they 
crop up everywhere, a rule unto themselves, self pos- 
sessed and regnant. If they have a vulnerable spot, 
it is not in their heels, for no rough road turns them 
back." I suspect that the Professor means to put that 
sentence into a lecture when he goes home, and he 
might have dwelt on it for an hour if I had not inter- 
rupted him to ask, like Meg Dods, "What for no?" I 



64 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

reminded him that there were times in every woman's 
life when a long journey is almost her salvation ; if 
she is devoured with gnawing cares, or, what is worse, 
with pampered indolence, there is nothing more to be 
desired for her than the sudden snapping x)f old fetters, 
and the stirring up of unused brain-power. 

" Of what, did you say ? " asked the Professor at this 
point. 

To go to Europe with a husband or father, who will 
take all the trouble and share all the pleasure, is some- 
what like being earned about in an old-fashioned sedan 
chair on men's shoulders; but to go with a party of 
lone women is to discover a new world. It involves 
self-sacrifice, sudden smothering of old prejudices, hard 
labor and harder patience; but so does everything else 
that is worth having. 

The Professor smiled paternally at me, and said, 
"Yes?" only yes, and nothing more. It was the 
"Boston yes" with an interrogation mark after it. 

Trust me, O beloved reader, the best of men and the 
dearest of husbands are all Turks in their hearts! 
They would hide their wives behind veils and lattices 
if they could, while they make the "grand tour." It ia 
hard to get on with them, but think, for a moment, how 
dreary it would be to get on without them. With all 
their faults, we love them still ! 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 65 



CHAPTER V. 

A WALK IN WESTMINSTER. 

**The English are a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick 
ingeniousness and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtle and 
sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the 
highest that human capacity can soar to." — Milton. 

"John Bull has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, 
heavy- witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. 
In a fe.w more centuries he will be the earthliest creature that 
ever the earth saw." — Hawthorne. 

THE guide-book quotes the saying of an old trav- 
eller (perhaps the Wandering Jew), that if he 
had but one day in London, he would ride up and down 
its famous streets and parks, and stop once — at West- 
minster Abbey. If I had ten days, which is the very 
least that London should receive from the most merci- 
less tourist, I would still go to the abbey, and the 
Houses of Parliament, on the first day, lest the world 
might come to an end before I could bless my eyes 
with them. 

The abbey is the only place where tombs and me- 
morial tablets are cheerful company. The constant 
inscription of famous and familiar names is like the 
sudden meeting of friends long looked for. It is a live- 



66 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

ly imagination, indeed, which could build unto itself a 
finer Westminster Abbey than the reality, and the first 
feeling, when one stands on its worn floor, is a sort of 
grateful surprise, like that of the Queen of Sheba, 
when she came to see Solomon, and, with a sigh of 
pleasure, confessed that "the half had not been told 
lier." The windows of the abbey are its crown of 
glory ; they make good cheer in a solemn place. They 
are said to do honor to certain kings and patriarchs, 
part Hebrew and part English; but to my mind they 
are a direct translation, into brilliant color, of certain 
verses in the Prayer Book, — " the glorious company 
of the Apostles — the goodly fellowship of the Proph- 
ets — and the noble army of Martyrs," who are sup- 
posed to praise God continually, and to pay some 
attention to the strivings of mortals towards a holier 
life. 

Some of the epitaphs are peculiaily unfit for sacred 
walls, like much of the wicked dust buried beneath 
them. If the devotional feeling survives such a dog- 
gerel couplet as that on the tomb of Gay, — 

" Life is a jest, and all things show it. 
Once I thought so, now I know it," — 

it is gone long before the daily service is finished. The 
careless, rattling way in which this is performed, is an 
early and late reproach to the dean and chapter. In 
the mouth of the man who read the Apostles' Creed, 
it might as well have been the children's rhyme, — 

" Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, 
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked," — 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 67 

for all that the closest attention could make of it with- 
out the Prayer Book. 

It is a shamefaced task to follow after Addison, and 
Lamb, and Washington Irving, in talking about the 
abbey, but that every one may find his own crumbs 
falling from this table of the past. The reader of 
Elia recognizes easily the tomb of his dear Duchess 
of ^N'ewcastle, lying on higher pillows than those of 
her husband. She came of a "good family," because 
"all her sisters were virtuous and her brothers valiant." 
It would go hard with some families if this test were 
applied to their goodness, and that may be the reason 
why every one who reads them, thinks them odd and 
quaint, when nothing could be more simple and true. 
She wrote many books, but she had no issue. It is 
odd to notice how invariably, in these epitaphs, those 
women are most glorified who had the largest families. 
iN^apoleon crystallized the opinion of forty centuries, 
when he told Madame de Stael that "she was the 
greatest woman, who had the most sons." In York 
Minster, on a memorial tablet, one reads that a certain 
Jane Hodson, wife of the chancellor of the cathedral, 
gave birth to twenty-four children, and died in her 
thirty-eighth year. "One, that was a woman, sir; but, 
rest her soul, she's dead ! " Of course tombstones and 
figure s cannot lie, and it is devoutly to be hoped that 
the resurrection will not come for a thousand years at 
least, that Jane Hodson may have a long rest. Per- 
haps they were all daughters — think of twenty-four 
daughters in one house! — think of the eleven thou- 
sand virgins of Cologne! and wonder not that Jane 
Hodson died before she was forty ! 



68 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

One thinks of the old fable of the fox taunting the 
lioness with bringing forth only one whelp at a time, 
and t?ie lioness proudly replies, "One, but a Ztow/" It 
seems to have been reserved for the nineteenth century 
to discover the tremendous fact, that in children, as in 
precious stones, quality rather than quantity is to be 
desired. 

An army of good women "sleep well, after life's fit- 
ful fever," in the abbey. Of one, it is said that her 
death made not only her husband, but " virtue, worth, 
and sweetness, widowers." I have no doubt they all 
married again right speedily. 

Of a certain Duchess of Buckingham, it is said "the 
duke and she lived lovingly and decently together, she 
patiently bearing the faults she could not remedy." It 
was a sweet old fashion of women to endure and make 
no sign — I fear it will have gone out altogether when 
they get their rights. 

Another was, "Blest with two babes, the thirde 
brought her to this." " This " is a fearfully and won- 
.derfully carved monument, which " Cecile, her hus- 
bande," built for her, "to prove his love did after death 
abide." He chose a material which abides much longer 
than love. 

One bereaved husband inscribed on his wife's tomb, 
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away- — 
blessed be the name of the Lord." He was thankful 
for both boons, but he had the grace to put this equiv- 
ocal compliment into Hebrew, which she probably 
could not understand. 

The name of Lady Russell, maid of honor to Eliza- 
beth, is sounded in our ears to this day by the vergers. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 69 

who take ns through the chapels, because she died of 
the prick of a needle. It is sometimes as good a 
ticket, for one's passage down to posterity, to die oddly^ 
as to die heroically, and it is far less trouble. 

These black-robed vergers, like all other foreign 
guides to- old churches, seem to have pickled them- 
selves for years in poor brandy, perhaps as a remedy 
against mould and damp. A blind person could easily 
follow them by the sense of smell. 

Every one pays tribute of a smile to a certain empty 
place made ready for a woman, who scorned to occupy 
it. A worshipful earl of James I.'s time built the usual 
stone table, had his own effigy placed in the middle, 
and that of his first wife on his right side, as was her 
due, leaving an equal space on his left for his second 
love ; but this lady would have the place of honor or 
none, and had herself buried elsewhere. 

The statue of Mrs. Siddons bears a strong resem- 
blance to the present reader and actress, Mrs. Scott- 
Siddons. She stood on a tragic pedestal all her life, 
as she does now in the abbey, and she could never 
step down from it into common life. Sydney Smith 
said she always stabbed the potatoes, and she once 
quelled a riotous crowd by simply standing up in her 
carriage and saying, "Tarn Sarah SiddonsP 

It is almost an invariable custom on English tombs 
to make the name of the survivors, who erected them, 
quite as conspicuous as that of the occujpant, thus in- 
geniously blowing the trumpet of the living and of the 
dead at the same time. 

Henry VII.'s chapel is the apex of the abbey's 
perfection, although some unfortunate was learned 







70 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

enough to see that it did not match the rest of the 
building. 

" Here's an acre, sown, indeed, 
With the richest, royalest seed." 

For many centuries no one outside of royal blood 
could be buried there, but the plebeians crept in at 
last, as they do into every kingly privilege. A king 
has little remaining to him now that he can really call 
his own but a title and a grave. 

The stone carving of this chapel roof is delicate as 
the ivory carving of a chessman, or, better still, the 
lavish leafage and flowering of a rose bush in June. 
In one aisle is buried Mary, Queen of Scots, and in 
the other her successful enemy, Queen Elizabeth. The 
width of the chapel divides them in death, as the great 
gulf between beauty and intellect divided them in life 
— the woman who was beautiful and knew it, and the 
woman who was not beautiful, but forced all the world 
to call her so. The chronicle says that Queen Bess 
questioned Melville sharply and closely whether Mary 
Stuart were taller than herself, and extorting an affir- 
mative answer, she replied, "Then your queen is too 
tall, for I am just the proper height." 

In this chapel is a round-cheeked baby lying in a 
stone cradle, and well covered up from the church 
damp. 

The seats where the monks listened to the endless 
services of the old religion were contrived, in case they 
grew drowsy and lost themselves, to give way beneath 
them, which must have been a lively warning to their 
fellow-sufferers. They managed these things better in 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 71 

Catholic times than in these latter days. Near by is a 
splendid tomb, built by the first Duke of Buckingham 
and his wife, which quite fills up the family burial-room, 
so that any other dead Buckinghams must be tucked 

into corners. 

The epitaph ought to have been, "After us, the 

Deluge." 

To English great men, Westminster Abbey is a sort 
of posthumous reward of merit. I never heard of but 
one who objected to sleep his last sleep within its 
walls. Sir Godfrey Kneller, a famous pninter of famous 
faces, did not yearn for the abbey, "because they do 
bury fools there," but later years proved to him that 
they do bury fools everywhere. 

The last great man buried there w^as Dickens, and 
by his own request he has no monument. His admir- 
ers must hope that the three-volumed epitaph, which 
Mr. Foster is now writing about him, has the lying 
quality of most epitaphs. As was said of another 
biographer, it would make death more terrible to think 
of having one's life written by such a friend. Dick- 
ens's ghost should haunt his pillow and quote in his 
■ ear, " I can take care of my enemies, but Heaven pre- 
serve me from my friends!" The old efiigies lie flat 
on their backs, or lean comfortably on one elbow, but 
in the more modern monuments, the statues are too 
often balanced on one leg, or stand forever in some 
pugnacious attitude, which tires and strains the eye 
to look at. When marble and repose are divorced, 
it wrongs the fitness of things; and when sculptors 
learn that it is unnatural and repulsive to be always 
straining one's muscles in marble, as well as in the 



/ 



72 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

flesh, there will be a new and glad sunrising in their 
art. 

The Chapter House of the monks, which long held 
the House of Commons, is now only the depository of 
curious writings, such as the certificate of the delivery 
of the heart of Henry IH. to a certain abbess, to whom 
he had promised it. I cannot imagine what a woman 
should want with a man's heart after he was dead. 
The Doomsday Book is there too, which, eight hundred 
years ago, made the same heart-burning that an income 
tax does now. The roof rises from a central pillar like 
the graceful branches of a palm-tree, but its sublime 
effect is lessened on looking into a glass case contain- 
ing skeletons of rats and old rags, that were found in 
very ancient parts of the cloister, and hence thought 
worthy of preservation. 

" Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind.away." 

There would be some sense in keeping Caesar's clay 
in a glass case, if one could identify the right hole, but 
one must be born and bred in England, to get any 
satisfaction out of sacredly preserving the skeleton of 
the rat that made the hole. 

We found our way with some trouble to the Jeru- 
salem Chamber, which was full of the perfume of a 
new cedar wainscoting. Whenever any great thing is 
done in England, it is sure to have a root or two 
springing out of this chamber. The elect doctors meet 
there every fortnight to compare notes of a new trans- 
lation of the Bible. When they have finished it, I 
fear some people will have to be converted over again, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 73 

the old texts will wear such different faces. Henry 
lY. died there. It had been prophesied to him that he 
should die in Jerusalem, and he had never ventured to 
go to the Holy Land. 

King Henry. — '* Does any name particular belong 

Unto the lodging where I first did swoon? " 
Warwick. — " 'Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord." 

I asked the porter of the abbey why this room was 
called Jerusalem, and he said, "Because that was the 
name of it." I have sought far and near for a better 
reason, but have not found one. Near it is the dining- 
room of the queen's scholars at Westminster School, 
savory with the ghosts of departed dinners. . The 
tables, much hacked with school-boy knives, are made 
of oak from the Spanish Armada. 

I had reached the Jerusalem Chamber by a long de- 
tour, through cloisters and ancient passages, fragrant 
of cedar, but I left it by a little door opening directly 
into the abbey itself. The longest way round was, in 
this case, the shortest way home. 

When Heinrich Heine went throuojh this home of 
dead Englishmen, he gave a shilling to the verger, with 
the remark, that he would have given him more if the 
collection had been complete. 

In the shadow of the abbey is the old parish church 
of Westminster, where Cromwell was married, but I 
don't know that any special interest attaches to the 
fact. He might as well have been a bachelor all his 
days, since his family proved too weak to hold the 
kingdom that he bequeathed to them. 

Just across the square, where one may, perhaps, meet 



74 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

a black gowned lawyer with his gray wig put on awry, 
are the Houses of Parliament. If the dress of English 
lawyers was intended to inspire respect, it is effectually 
banished by their careless way of wearing it. 

There are few more ludicrous sights than a red head 
in a gray wig that is too small for it. 

The noblest entrance to the Houses of Parliament is 
by the great hall, in which Charles I. and Warren 
Hastings came to grief, and where, in the small court- 
rooms leading out of it, smaller sinners are daily get- 
ting their deserts. 

At this time the Tichborne trial drew a crowd every 
day to see the "claimant" come out of court. He is 
the very picture of a butcher. He could not look 
more like one, if he had been pre-ordained to that 
trade from the beginning of the world. The only 
thing going on in the hall during our visit was the 
manual exercise of a troop of bare-legged Highland- 
ers. There were hundreds of men in it, but such was 
the immensity of the hall that they were in nobody's 
way. The countless rooms and galleries of this vast 
talking-place of the nation are almost too gay and 
modern for English taste. It must be a satisfaction to 
them to see that the stone, of which it is built, is 
already beginning to crumble, as if ashamed of its 
newness. 

The way to the "Ladies' Gallery" in the House of 
Commons is a straight and narrow path, and few there 
be that travel it. By means of a powerful letter of in- 
troduction, which did set us forth to be very remark- 
able women indeed, we softened the heart of Mr. 
Moran, the hard-working secretary of the American 



A WOMAN'S VACATION 75 

legation, who, for fifteen years, has had the training 
of our ministers to their court duties, and were ad- 
mitted to the gallery between three and four in the 
afternoon. The session often lasts all night, but there 
is a tacit law, that no vexed questions shall be brought 
on the floor after midnight. The Ladies' Gallery is 
tucked under the very ceiling of the room, and closed 
in with brass lattice-work, like that from which Turk- 
ish beauties look down on their lords' pastimes without^ 
being seen. It is evident enough that women were of 
very small account in English politics when Parliament 
was first established, while large, open galleries sur- 
round the hall for male visitors. The members of the 
House wear their hats, except when speaking, which 
may be a relic of the time when government work 
was done out of doors, or it may be a delicate English 
way of intimating that the Commons are lords of crea- 
tion whatever good reason they had at first, they 

evidently wear their hats now because the room is so 
crowded there is no other place to keep them. 

The two generals of government and opposition, 
Mr. Gladstone and Disraeli, remain uncovered all the 
time. No one in the galleries may wear his hat, not 
even the Prince of Wales himself. 

Some "sweet little cherub that sits up aloft'! for the 
guidance of forlorn women must have led us to choose 
that day of all others. 

When we first looked down through (he lattice, a 
tall man, in a coat of miraculous fit, was speaking in 
a careful monotone, with every sentence rounded like a 
ball. He seemed at a loss for an occupation for his 
hands, and maltreated his pockets a good deal at first; 



76 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

but this restlessness soon passed away, while the quiet 
of the room was intense. An upward turn of his head 
showed the features of Disraeli. It was a long-ex- 
pected speech on the abolishing of intermediate courts 
of judicature in Scotland and Ireland. He paid many 
studied compliments to the government, and the only 
restless listener was Mr. Gladstone (divided from him 
by the width of a table), who fidgeted about his seat, 
made notes on a bit of paper, and sometimes whispered 
a word in the ear of his neighbor. Mr. Gladstone 
replied to him, point by point, with a swift, clear utter- 
ance, that was music to^ ears strained by listening to 
Mr. Disraeli's thick voice and measured periods. He 
called his opponent's argument " an inverted pyramid 
without any reason, he might say, with not a rag of 
reason in it." He answered a slight slur on Scottish 
brains by saying that he had always looked on Scot- 
land as " an exporting country, having too many brains 
through all time for her own market," which called forth 
great applause from certain sandy-haired and sharp- 
featured members, whom I took to be Scotchmen. 

When these two lions had done roaring, and smaller 
[ones began to free their minds, the decorous stillness 
changed to perfect confusion ; the members began to 
write letters and talk to their neighbors, while not a 
few composed themselves to sleep. Mr. Disraeli, as he 
listened, did so discharge his face of every particle of 
expression, that he looked as if he heard only the lull- 
ing sound of rain on the roof. 

Times are grown into joint for him since, as a young 
man making his maiden speech, he was forced by 
coughs and hisses to sit down. He yielded then, say- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 77 

ing calmly, "I will sit down now, but the time will 
come when you shall hear me." Mr. Disraeli can com- 
pel English , attention, which, in itself, is a labor of 
Hercules, and he can write "Lothair," but he can lever 
make himself an Englishman. When he was taunted 
with his Jewish descent, he retorted instantly, " When 
your ancestors were squalid savages digging in the 
earth for roots, mine were princes in the Temple." An 
Englishman, in like case, would have put up his eye- 
glass and stolidly glared down his enemy without a 
word. He is said to have been deeply attached to that 
ancient wife, who loved him like a mother, and this 
was his first speech since her death. 

The crowded HouSe of Commons is perhaps as good 
a place as any to look for the type of English gentle- 
men. There is a certain family resemblance between 
them, as there would be in the most heterogeneous 
gathering of tribes after they have eaten and drunken 
and slept together long enough, with the one exception 
of Mr. Disraeli. I think no twin is possible for him. 
"Nature made him, and then broke the mould." 

Is it not Holmes who says that one test of a gentle- 
man is not to say "haow"and not to eat with the 
knife? In bank, and street, and shop, in England, I 
constantly heard the flat sound given to words having 
ou in them. Even in the House of Commons some 
one said "paound" and "haouse." Since "haow" has 
reappeared in this well of English undefiled, we may 
perhaps soon teach our children to eat with their 
knives. Gail Hamilton lays down the law that the 
talisman of gentlemanhood lies in the finger-nails. An 
old English court decided that he was a gentleman 



78 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

who kept a gig. But James Hannay settled it forever 
for Englishmen, "No one could be a gentleman unless 
his ancestors wore chain-armor in the thirteenth cen- 
tury." It behooves Americans to look for other tests. 

A swell young Englishman with a cousin in the 
baronetage, being suddenly challenged by one of our 
party to stand and deliver his definition of a gentle- 
man, replied that " he was one whose father and grand- 
father had never worked for a living;" but he was 
routed horse and foot, with great slaughter, by the re- 
joinder, that there were plenty of people in America 
whose father and grandfather had never worked for a 
living. In fact, the habit ran in the family, but they 
were usually maintained in the poorhouses of their re- 
spective parishes. 

The House of Lords is an intensely stupid place to 
a stranger. The bishops are so smothered in their 
wigs and gowns, that they hem an4 ha, and have a very 
apoplectic time of it, getting out what they want to 
say. In fact, it seems to be a fixed belief among Eng- 
lish people that rapid talkers must of necessity be 
rather giddy-headed, and that what is dug out of the 
mind with most difficulty must be of most value. Mr. 
Gladstone, however, talks like a running brook with 
sparkling ripples of wit. In the ante-room of the House 
of Lords one reads the names under the hat pegs, D. 
Somerset, E. Clanricarde, L. Powis, as if it were David, 
Edward and Luke, instead of Duke, Earl and Lord. 

We went gayly home in a hansom after our first dip 
in English politics, scorning to notice the pain in our 
necks from straining them up to that brass lattice for 
two mortal hours. We were full of pity for the 



A WOMAN'S VACATIOJSrr ' 79 

"brave lady," our countrywoman, who bearded Mr. 
Moran in his den that same afternoon, with nothing 
but her open countenance to recommend her, and de- 
manded six tickets for the Ladies' Gallery. She was 
sent away empty-handed and sorrowful ; but we are 
much mistaken in our countrywoman, if Mr. Morau 
has seen the last of her. " 





80 • BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER VI. 

LONDON IN WATEE-COLOES. 

" On the Thames, Sir Roger de Corerley made several reflec- 
tions on the greatness of the British nation, — as that one Eng- 
lishman could beat three Trenchmen; that the Thames was the 
noblest river in Europe ; that London Bridge was a greater piece 
of work than any of the seven wonders of the world, — with 
many other honest prejudices which naturally cleave to the heart 
of a true Englishman." — Addison. 

P to this time, I have been only skirting about 
London, in what were once vilhiges, at some dis- 
tance from it; but the neighboring monster grew and 
grew till it swallowed them all up, and called them by 
its own name. King James I., in his wisdom, thought 
he could keep people in the country by imposing a line 
on those who moved to London ; but any woman could 
have told him that he had only added one more fasci- 
nation to city living. A man will die for a forbidden 
jthing, and more martyrs have gone to the stake for 
the sake of their own way than for religion. 

The real London is inside of Temple Bar — a dark, 
huge, old archway, which once served to hold up the 
heads of traitors, but has no use now except to ob- 
struct the street. So tenacious was the old city of its 



A WOMAN'S VACATION', 81 

rights, that the king in his chariot could not pass this 
Bar without pausing to receive permission from the 
mayor. 

In "the city," used now only by business and pov- 
erty, all the great English joys and sorrows have come 
to pass. A tall monument tells how it was burned up 
by the "great fire," so rare a thing then that they 
looked for no minor causes, but called it a "judgment 
of God " on their sins ; the earthquake cracked their 
chiua vases, and sent all the chief sinners out of town; 
and in 1666 "the plague" left only the tenth person 
alive. "The people die so," says Pepys, "that now it 
seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by 
daylight, the night not sufficing to do it in." 

The dome of St. Paul's draws all feet towards it; it 
is venerable enough on the outside, but within, it is as 
cheap and modern as whitewash, and stucco, and gild- 
ing can make it. Dickens insisted that it was nobler 
than St. Peter's at Rome, but he was the most bigoted 
of Englishmen, and a truth that has been sifted through 
English prejudice must be of very tough fibre if there 
is anything left of it. 

The strength of St. Paul's is not wasted on carving 
or stained glass; the lower part is too light and the 
dome too dark- — only the distances are magnificent. 
The effect is not of being in a church at all, but of 
being out of doors in a cloudy day with no trees in 
sight. Its real beauty is best seen from the whispering 
gallery running round the dome, whence the overpower- 
ing depth and height marry each other, and silence all 
carping criticism: one's love of beauty is stifled in 
one's respect for simple bigness. N'elson and Welling- 
6 



82 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

ton are buried in state in the cellar, with candles burn- 
ing before them as if they were altars ; plenty of other 
quiet folks keep them company, and among them Sir 
Christopher Wren, who desired no other monument 
than St. Paul's itself, which he designed and built ; and 
the unlucky Dr. Donne, who made an epigram on his 
marriage, with more truth than poetry in it, — - 

" John Donne — Anne Donne — undone," — 

and had to depend on the charity of friends all his life 
for house-room in which to bring up his twelve children 
" Children," says Lord Bacon, " mitigate the remem- 
brance of death." They must have made poor Dr. 
Donne actually in love with it. His poem of " The 
Shipwreck " makes one's flesh creep. 

Out of a white army of statues in the body of the 
church, that of Dr. Samuel Johnson strikes one with 
pity ; a man so wedded to a full-bottomed wig, and 
voluminous garments, that he seemed to have been 
horn in them, is sculptured to stand half naked, through 
all time, in St. Paul's. It is worse than his voluntary 
penance of standing an hour in the market-place of 
Uttoxeter, where he was born, for some disobedience 
to his parents committed fifty years before. 

It v/as a rather touching and romantic thing to do, 
and to think of afterwards; but it reads like pure silli- 
ness in a man, who spoke "Johnsonese," and drank 
*seventeen cups of tea at a sitting. Sculptors have a 
terrible passion for nudity; they would have forbidden 
poor Eve her fig-leaves; but to strip a man who wrote 
a dictionary (the "Hippopotamus of Literature," as 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 83 

Mrs. Jameson called him) of his clothes, is going too 
far for decency. 

Passing by the Marl'sion House whore the lord 
mayor exists, chiefly to give good dinners, we come, 
after many windings among crooked streets, Jews, and 
evil odors, to the Tower, whose stones have been wet 
with so much innocent blood, for little or no reason but 
the will of the, king. We have certainly improved on 
those old days, in that no man can now behead another 
without an uncommonly good reason for it. If kings 
are going out of fashion, there are still some compen- 
sations. All the lachrymals in the British Museum 
would not hold the tears that have been shed within 
these thick walls. The " Queen's Beef-eaters " lie in 
wait, within the gates, in a fantastic uniform of many 
colors, to take a shilling, and its owner, up stairs and 
down stairs, and in the ladies' chamber, where Lady 
Jane Grey wrote her name and her resignation on the 
wall, with those of other unhappy prisoners. We 
looked into the little room built in the wall, where Sir 
Walter Raleigh slept, when he whiled away his long- 
imprisonment with writing a History of the World. 
I have seen worse rooms at summer watering-j^laces, 
but nowhere else. In the outer room is an effigy of 
gaunt Queen Bess on horseback, in a velvet gown cov- 
ered with eyes and ears ; if it was there in Raleigh's 
time, he must have smiled bitterly to himself as he 
remembered the day when he laid his cloak in the mud 
that the maiden queen might not soil her shoe. 

Great store of arms are arranged in the form of lilies 
and passion-flowers, and heavy suits of mail show how 
much stronger men and horses must have been in the 



84 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

old days, even to have .carried them to the edge of 
battle. 

The sweetest old romance about the Tower is the 
story of James I., of Scotland, the poet-prince, who 
was kept there, as a hostage for his father's good faith, 
by the English king. He fell in love with Joanna 
Beaufort, a noble maiden whom he used to see from 
his window walking in her garden. His love blossomed 
into a poem that would read well if one had never 
heard that a king wrote it. When he came unto his 
own, he married the lady of his window-love. To be 
a king and a happy husband was too much joy for one 
man, and he was soon assassinated in his own palace, 
in presence of his wife and Lady Catharine Douglass, 
who kept out the conspirators by bolting the door 
with her arm, and holding it there until they broke 
the bone. His wife's arm w^ould have been a little 
more poetical instead of one of the Douglasses, "tender 
and true" though they were. Some one has painted 
a tender and true picture of the scene for one of the 
galleries of the Houses of Parliament. 

The crown jewels and gold dishes kept in the Tower 
are so very splendid, that they are almost vulgar; an 
old woman hurries one in and out of the room as if 
she wanted to cry, " Thieves, thieves ! " instead of the 
the names of the treasure. 

The " Kohinoor " is about as brilliant as a clean glass 
salt-cellar. I had longed to look in tlie face of this 
queen of diamonds, and was consoled in my disappoint- 
ment with the intimation that I had only seen a fac- 
simile, the real stone- being hidden in a safer place, so 
that it might as well have remained in the bowels of 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 85 

the earth. The water gate of the Tower opens no 
more to criminals coming privately by the river, that 
the populate need not attempt a rescue ; few people go 
to prison now whom the public do not condemn as 
heartily as those in authority. The Thames is but a 
muddy and insignificant stream, to have watered so 
great space in English history and fiction. There are 
few English books that do not, in some form, pay trib- 
ute to it. I am inclined to say " amen " to Sir Roger 
de Coverley's opinion of London Bridge ; it is one of 
many gray old structures dotted over England, which 
seem to have come into being with the ground they 
stand on, to serve as patterns for men to build from. 
Ghastly memories lurk under its arches ; the opaque 
water has often closed over 

" One more unfortunate, 
Rashly importunate, 
Gone to her death ; " 

but it bears on its surface an abundant and busy life, 
that gives small tliought to the sorrowful sights beloW 
it. Plenty of gay little steamers, like the one we 
boarded at the bridge, ply up and down the river all 
day, carrying deck loads of passengers, for there is no 
cabin accommodation. Londoners shed rain as easily 
as a flock of ducks; if they always went in when it 
rained, they would stai/ in most of their lives. W,e 
pass over, without knowing it, that tremendous bore, 
the Thames Tunnel, and gradually leave behind us the 
dingy walls and disreputable suburbs, which most do 
congregate on the banks of rivers in a city. 

After a while the river begins to clear its charac- 



86 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

ter from the stains of man's imperfections, and the 
peculiarly bright-green grass of this climate slopes 
down on either bank to meet its caresses. Greenwich 
must find favor in all eyes approaching it from the 
water. 

The Hospital rears a noble front close upon the river, 
and on a hill beyond rises the Observatory where lon- 
gitude begins. An Englishman accompanied us whom 
we looked upon as an excellent guide, till it came out, 
as we landed, that this was also Ms first visit to Green- 
wich. Knowing he could see it at any time, he had 
never seen it at all ; like the old farmer whom Lowell 
found among the White Hills, who had always lived 
within a mile of the "Old Man of the Mountain," and 
had never cared to look towards it. We went first 
into a grand entrance hall hung round with portraits 
of naval heroes; the ceiling was one vast fresco on 
some mythological subject, which I was content to be- 
lieve a miracle of art, rather than to break my neck in 
studying it. This hall opens into the "Painted Cham- 
ber," having one whole side covered with an allegorical 
picture of those Hanoverian despots, the Georges. The 
painter, not content with his name in a corner, has intro- 
duced a full length of himself, and is the finest-looking 
man in the picture. Here are shown the coat and vest, 
with a bullet hole through them, that Nelson wore 
when death found him at Trafalgar. Here, too, are 
the relics of Sir John Franklin's expedition, found 
among the Esquimaux — forks and spoons, coins, a 
j^^ck-knife, and a little book which must have looked 
to the Esquimaux the most useless thing that ever was 
made. Nelson is made a sort of demigod at Gr^n- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 87 

wich by statues, busts, and portraits ; but the stubborn 
ugliness of his features has defied the skill of every 
artist to soften them. 

It must be a cross, grievous to be borne by brethren 
of the brush and chisel, that homely men so often insist 
on being heroes. 

One small room is wholly devoted to Nelson pictures; 
in one called his "immortality," he is being carried to 
the upper world by fat little cherubs, who seem actually 
to puff over their work ; one of them carried a scroll 
wipth the words, "England expects every man to do his 
duty ; " and the whole picture is a conglomerate mass 
of angels and tritons tugging at one heavy man. One 
is sorry to find the name of Benjamin West in the 
corner. ♦ 

The chapel is rich in wood carving and marble pave- 
ment, but the seats are only wooden benches ; the old 
men would never miss a fluted pillar or two, while 
cushions would be a great luxury to them. It seems 
to me that in nearly all hospitals and asylums, and 
other stow-away places for cast-off humanity, the archi- 
tects provide so largely for the souls of the inmates 
that there is very little left for their bodies ; whereas, 
in reality, they are all body, and no soul worth men- 
tioning. 

The domestic part of this Hospital is in the old royal 
palace of the Stuarts ; the great hall, once the ball-room 
of Charles II., that merry and worthless king, — 

*' Who never said a foolish thing, 
And never did a wise one," — 

is *now divided into bedrooms for the pensioners ; the 



88 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

doors were all open, displaying such little knick-knacks 
as sailors love to collect. 

There is nothing about the room to remind one of 
the time when virtue went clean out of fiishion under 
the Stuarts. The walls must often have looked down 
on the neglected "queen, Catharine of Braganza, least 
of all women in the eyes of her husband, who forced 
her to treat courteously the courtesans who had sup- 
planted her. At the end of this great room is a statue 
of the everlasting Nelson, and on the pedestal lay a 
small, dirty bundle, which proved to be a pair of stock- 
ings worn by him on some remarkable occasion. 

If the shades of the departed ever revisit the earth, 
the ghost of Nelson must wear a bitter sneer over the 
hero-worship which could give a place of 'honor to his 
stockings, and leave his beloved Lady Hamilton to die 
of want ! 

From the hall we went down to the old men's smok- 
ing-room, without which no sailor could be happy. A 
long row of them were puffing away at their pipes, a 
weather-beaten but chirruping old company. 

Long tables and benches, scoured to snowy white- 
ness, were ranged along an immense dining-room ; an 
old negro, the only one we met among the pensioners, 
did the honors of his kitchen with a pompous affability 
never to be reached by a white man. His hair and 
beard were snow-white, as if he had been standing 
uncovered in a snow-storm. 

The great tanks for tea and cocoa sent forth a goodly 
savor, and a bowl was tilled with tea for us to taste. 
We found it very good. The allowance to one brew- 
ing is three and a half pounds for four hundred men. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 89 

I know not if this is the same computation on a large 
scale as that supposed to have been established by the 
first old maid: "Two tea-spoonfuls for each person and 
one for the teapot." 

Most of these veterans have lost a leg or an arm, or 
bear other honorable scars from their country's service. 
They must have served fourteen years in the navy, or 
have been wounded in an action with the enemy, before 
they can be admitted as pensioners. Many of them 
have wives outside, and draw their rations to be shared 
with them. It has long been a vexed question whether 
women should be included in the hospital charity, but 
nothing has been done about it, and it would seem to 
be the first axiom in the study of womankind, that no 
great number of them can live together in peace. 

The quiet comfort of the Hospital seems to renew 
the lease of life usually given to men. One lean and 
withered old fellow hopped after us on his wooden leg, 
through several rooms, chirping out like a superannu- 
ated cricket, that "he was ninety-two, and his wife 
eighty-eight, and they never missed their rations." 
Everywhere, on doorsteps and lying on benches in 
sunny spots, we came upon these battered old hulks, 
safely moored at last ; an air of garrulous contentment 
hung" about them all, only one thought he did not have ^ 
tobacco enough ; but who ever saw an old sailor who 
could be satisfied in that particular? 

The necessary order and discipline of so large an 
establishment cannot oppress them, for they have been 
used to it all their lives on shipboard. In the grounds 
is a full-rigged ship of war, in which a school of boys, 
children of the j)ensioners, is taught the rules of the 
naval service. 



90 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Late in the afternoon we took steam again for Lon- 
don, full of admiration for this noble charity. The 
English do a thing well if they do it at all, and one 
cannot but cherish a warmer feeling towards a nation 
which holds out such kindly arms of protection to the 
old age of its servants. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION 91 



CHAPTER YIT. 

SUNDAY IN LONDON. 

JJamlet. — " Why was he sent into England ? " 

Clown. — " Why? Because he was mad ; he shall recover his 

wits there, or if he do not, 'tis no great matter, — there the men 

are as mad as he." — Shakspeare. 

IF you have but one Sunday in London, it is a diffi- 
cult matter to cut it up to advantage. Ten years 
ago, all strangers and sojourners in London went to see 
and hear Mr. Spurgeon ; but he is no new thing under ^ 
the sun, and is said to live largely on the income of his ^ 
reputation. People no longer pay a shilling for a seat q 
in his Tabernacle. 

The gayest and most ritualistic church service is at 
St. Andrew's, Welles Street, wliere the Protestantism 
is so very " Mgfh " as to be clean out of sight. In ut- ^ 
ter contrast is the straight-backed old church where 
Whitefield preached, the mnn who was said to put so 
much pathos into the word " Mesopotamia " as to bring 
tears to the eyes of his hearers. 

John Wesley, who was so tremulously good,* that he 
could never be quite certain that he had been really con- 
verted, preached there too, but the mantle of neither of 
these prophets of Methodism Ivas fallen on the present 
shepherd. Across the way from this church is the bury- 



92 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

ing-ground of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan rests from 
his " progress." 

The Temple Church ought to hive a fraetion of your 
Sunday. A bit of Norman architecture, the head- 
quarters of the Knights Templars, whose religious vow 
hound them to fight the enemies of the church, and 
whose inclination made them find enemies wherever 
there were revenge and plunder. 

• Their meek symbols of the cross and the Iamb dot 
the church all over, and their effigies, in armor, lie 
dead enough in the porch. What a fall was there, 
when they "decayed through pride," and these war- 
like precincts were given over to lawyers, though it 
may be they fight harder in a quiet way than the 
Templars. 

In a sunny nook beside the church "lyes Oliver 
Goldsmith." His lack of common sense led him a 
hard life in the body, but his simplicity and wisdom 
may serve in the other world to make his spirit re- 
spected. A gate, opening into a still, funereal square, 
leads to the Temple Gardens, a sweet green spot in 
the wide waste of London streets. The wars of the 
Roses, when the English must needs fight each other, 
having tired out their enemies, have a root in this gar- 
den. When the lords were too loud in the Temple 
hall, the garden was " more convenient." 

Somerset. — " Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer, 
But dare maintain the party of the truth, 
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn, with me.*' 

Warwick. — *' I love no colors ; and without all color 
Of base, insinuating flattery, 
^ I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet." 



A WOMAN'S vacation: 93 

Plantagenet. — " Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset? *' 
Somerset. — " Hath not thy rose a thorn, Plantagenet? " 

Here Charles and Mary Lamb lived, and made puns 
in upper chambers, and were visited by famous friends. 
We found the very fountain where John Westlock and 
Ruth Pinch stood, when they looked in each other's 
eyes and found love there ; one of the prettiest love 
scenes ever put together by Dickens or another. 

But if you want to be thrilled by the sweetest music 
this side heaven, you will go to a service at the Found- 
ling Hospital, and hear an anthem sung by four hun- 
dred orphan children. Their orphanhood may not 
affect the music, but it will affect your feelings, which 
amounts to the same thing. If the pearly gates do not 
open then, and show a gleam of the white-robed crowd 
within, you must be liard-hearted indeed. 

The hospital was founded by Captain Thomas Coram 
for exposed and deserted children, of whom he had 
been one. From the unaccountable perversity, com- 
mon to all trustees, that no testator once safe under 
ground, should ever have his own way, the hospital has 
been changed to a receptacle for illegitimate children 
whose mothers are known^ whereas Captain Coram's 
object was to provide for those little miserables, whose 
mothers had deserted them because they did not wish 
to be known. One might leave a fortune to charitable 
purposes with a serene mind, if one were sure of com- 
ing into the world about once in every fifty years to 
look after it. The foundation is a very rich one, but 
no stranger can pass its door without dropj^ing a bit 
of silver (copper will not do) into the plate held there 
for the purpose. *'*' 



94 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

When any modern Job is given over to the adver- 
sary to be tempted, I have no doubt that the first step 
is to get him elected as trustee of an orphan asylum. 

The girls at the "Foundling" wear a picturesque 
costume of brown stuff frocks, with white aprons, and 
three-cornered, handkerchiefs over the shoulders, and 
'^ a little Normandy cap with high crown, an exceed- 
ingly becoming fashion, revived for girls in the year 
of our Lord 1873. 

Illegitimate children are, for obvious reasons, hand- 
somer, as a rule, than the offspring of poor and lawful 
parentage, and many of the boys and girls at the 
Foundling are "not Angles, but angels." 

Any mother might be proud to call them hers. The 
children are trained to make the responses musically, 
and if they cannot understand the sermon, they can rest 
their eyes with looking at the lovely picture, by Ben- 
jamin West, of " Christ blessing little children." The 
V effect is very pretty at one point in the service, when 
they all bury their faces in their aprons for a moment ; 
they look like a multitude of little widows. Dickens 
came often to this church, and used it more than once 
in building his books. 

After service we went through the crowded but 
spotless bedrooms, and into the long dining-rooms, 
where the children filed in, the little ones led by the 
•Wders, to eat their Sunday dinner of cold beef and let- 
tuce, cut up in little hills on the plates of the younger 
fry. They made some little exchanges of provender 
while the. nurses looked another way. 

One little girl, with great dreamy, blue eyes and gold- 
en lifer, a child made on purpose for a Sunday school 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 95 

book, and sure to die young, was a picture to study. 
She might have sat for a cherub, without altering a 
hair. She ate with indifference, as the spiritual sort 
always do, until a neighbor laid violent hands on her 
cup of water; then my cherub gave the hand a good 
scratch, and made up a face at her enemy, that destroyed 
my angelic theory in a breath. It seems to be a notion 
born with us, that fair hair and blue eyes imply sweetness 
in their owner ; an old-fashioned heroine was sure to be 
a blonde, and the villain was dark, to a dead certainty. 
My little orphan at the Foundling was a Tartar, but 
people will be deluded by her all her life long. The 
hospital is made a weekly show, but the children seem 
to enjoy it as much as their visitors, and Captain Coram 
would not have objected to anything that made them 
happy. 

In the old town of Middleboro', Mass., I have seen a 
Bible hoarded like miser's gold, which was given to 
Margaret Hutchinson " by her friend, Thomas Coram," 
before the Revolution — a stout old Bible, once thrown 
into the street when Governor Hutchinson's house was 
sacked by a Boston mob, but doing good service yet, 
like this other noble charity of the giver. 

When we came out on the porch, the rain poured 
down in torrents ; it could not have rained harder on 
the day when Noah launched the ark, and the wicked 
ones besran to think he meant business after all. 

The hospital stands far back from the street ; no cab 
was to be had for love or money in the neighborhood, 
and our feminine souls shrank from a long scout in 
search of one. 

For two mortal hours we stood helpless iu^that 



96 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

porch, reflecting on the equality of the sexes, while 
husbands and fathers made distant sallies, bringing back 
cab after cab to their waiting flocks. We prayed ear- 
rrestly to these cabmen to return for us, but their fares 
must have lived at Land's End or John o' Groat's 
house, for " they went on their way, and we saw them 
no more." 

One weighty old Englishman had engaged a cab to 
come back for him ; but when it arrived a quick-witted 
and unscrupulous little widow, with a troop of chil- 
dren all dressed in mourning, after the British fashion 
(which would give a bereaved dog a black blanket), 
hurried into it, and it was just starting when the old 
gentleman brought up his rear guard of dowagers to 
take it. The widow regarded him sadly, yet serenely, 
as widows have a habit of doing, and never budged ; 
he grew so purple in the face, that he would have had 
a fit on the spot, if the rain had not cooled him off". 

The cabman drove away like Jehu, son of Nimshi, 
before he could recover his breath, and John Bull came 
back to the porch with both fists doubled up, and saying 
over and over, in a subdued roar, "If it had not been 
for the children ; if it had not been for the children" — 

But for them, the little widow would evidently not 
liave survived long enough to marry again. 

"If we were only widows!" sighed Juno, as we saw 
her triumph. "If I ever come abroad again," said 
Minerva, '*I will come with a friend and her husband. 
A gentleman in the j^arty is absolutely necessary to 
comfort in travelling." 

"Friend's husband!" said Juno, scornfully; "I will 
come with a husband of my own, and neither borrow 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 97 

nor lend." Juno had already made one dive into the 
storm, after a cab, and was now a " very damp, moist, 
unpleasant body," indeed. At last the rain held up, 
— a most unlikely thing for English rain to do, — and 
we waded home, sadder and wiser women. 

Some time since, the Prince of Wales set the fashion 
of going to "the Zoo" (which is short Enghsh for 
Zoological Gardens) on a Sunday afternoon. You can 
see the wild animals at any time ; but since the royal 
visit, if you want to study men, women, and monkeys 
at the same time, it is best done on Sunday afternoon. 

Another favorite haunt of Cockneys on Sunday is 
the palace of Hampton Court, which Wolsey built and 
gave to Henry VIII., who had a habit of rolling a 
greedy eye upon whatever his courtiers held most dear, 
whether it were wives or houses. 

The approach through Bushy Park is as lovely as 
ancient oaks and shadow-flecked grass, tame deer, and 
mossy old fountains can make it. One might almost 
envy Nebuchadnezzar his punishment, if he w^ere to 
suffer it in Bushy Park. The palace is more or less 
inhabited in corners, by half-pay officers, aristocratic 
widows who have seen better days, and other poverty- 
stricken gentry, who have a little blue blood in their 
veins, and some claim on the regard of the crown. I 
wish the queen would let in another regiment of them, 
and shut up a few of the endless galleries where one 
asks for bread and gets only pictures, long before the 
last room is reached. The majority of the pictures are 
like Dean Swift's country house, — 

" Too bad for a blessing, too good for a curse ; 
I wish from my soul it were better or worse." 



98 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

One or two heads, by Titian, gleam out of darkness, 
but the specimens of the old masters are but the sweep- 
ings of their studios. The room where one lingers 
longest is perhajDS the one containing the portraits of 
the beauties of Charles II.'s court, painted by Lely, and 
Vandyke, and Kneller. 

They were a graceless set, and they look as if they 
gloried in the fact, and would not have it otherwise if 
they could. 

Nell Gwynne, who boasted herself " the Protestant 
mistress " (as if those two words could ever live to- 
gether ! ), looks unfit to sell oranges at a theatre door, 
or to do any other honest business. The one exqui- 
site face, a lily among passion-flowers, is the Countess 
of Richmond, for whose charms Charles II. would have 
divorced the childless Catharine, if Clarendon (who 
wished to secure the succession of his own daughter 
to the throne) had not manceuAa'ed her into a marriage 
with the old Duke of Richmond. She is grudgingly 
acknowledged to have been good, when it was the all- 
prevailing fashion to be bad. 

One other portrait among ten thousand, keeps house 
in my memory, a head of Madame de Pompadour, by 
Greuze, who always painted women's heads, as if he 
were in love with every one of them. If you cover 
the lower part of her face, the rest is intellectual in the 
highest degree ; but if you hide the upper part, it is 
only voluptuous. She caught the king with her mouth 
and chin, but she held him with her eyes and forehead. 

When I look back on Hampton Court, it seems to 
have been haunted chiefly by Queen Charlotte and her 
fifteen children. One of them, the Duchess of Glouces- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION". 99 

ter, always accounted for the misfortunes of her family 
by saying, " There were too many of us — too many 
of us!" 

They line broad walls, the queen looking intoler- 
ably self-satisfied ; and the whole fifteen, if they were 
" summed up and closed " in one, would not have had 
grace enough to be worth painting. 

The gardens of Hampton Court are the loveliest part 
of it ; the giant grape vine, planted by Mary Stuart, 
has thriven better than any other seed of her planting^ 
and the fragrant darkness of the Lady's Walk is 
worthy of her tread. 

The half-pay officers and the aristocratic widows are 
in clover here ; they must have been well off, indeed, 
if they have seen better days than they* find in this 
palace. Five cartoons of Raphael, made familiar to us 
by engravings, used to glorify Hampton Court, but 
they have been removed to the museum at South Ken- 
sington. 

In that- museum is everything in the way of gold, and 
precious stones, and china, and wrought work, that it 
ever entered a woman's heart to desire ; but the collec 
tion is so inhuman in its vastness, that one tires of it at 
last, and longs to balance it by a week in a wigwam, 
with clam-shells for spoons. 

The same feeling of satiety, the Apollyon of travel- 
lers, clutches us before we have even glanced at all 
the rooms of the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. 
There are no pictures there, however, that one can feel 
a comfortable contempt for. I only wish that some of 
the hard, old virgins painted in the dark ages, whose 
facial angles could be demonstrated like a proposition 



100 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

in Euclid, might be burnt, for the credit of the women- 
kind who lived at that date. 

Here an altar is set up for Turner, the one god of 
English art, and Ruskin, his prophet. I longed to ad- 
mire his pictures, but I could only admire Ruskin, that 
he had eyes to see the beauty hidden from me. Now 
and then he has a landscape, sunlit and restful as a 
Claude, but for the most part he has gone color-mad. 

In a picture called (I believe) " Rain, Wind, and 
Speed," he must have rubbed together with his thumb 
all the colors on his palette, and then copied the result 
on canvas. After severe study, I thought he meant to 
make a locomotive driving through a stormy night; 
but very likely it was something altogether dijQferent. 

We greet' Hogarth's " Marriage a la Mode " as an 
old friend; but like all broad satire, there is small com- 
fort in looking at it; it leaves a bad taste in the 
mouth. 

There are one or two portraits by Gainsborough, who 
either had the luck to j^aint very noble and pure-look- 
ing women, or the genius to make them look so on can- 
vas. I don't know which would be the greater boon, 
to have beauty and suffer the fading of it, or to look 
like common folks in the flesh, and receive an immor- 
tality of loveliness in a portrait by Gainsborough. 

There is a group of baby angels by Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds, in whom every mother must trace a look of her 
own treasures ; and out of a crowd of better and 
famous pictures looks a wonderful woman's head, with 
black eyes, and a crown of gold hair, by Paris Bor- 
doni. It made me seize the catalogue ravenously, and 
alter all it was only "An Italian Lady." If you find a 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 101 

head in any gallery that tells you some bewildering 
story, the catalogue is sure to call it " Portrait of a 
Lady," or " Head of a Gentleman." You knew that be- 
fore, and straightway christen it for yourself. This 
gold-haired splendor, whom I alone bowed down to, 
should have had a dagger in her hand, and been called 
^' A Woman TJndecewed^'^ 

There are clouds of angels, and great companies of 
martyrs, each with a face of his own, no two alike, by 
that rare artist, Fra Angelico, who never painted any- 
thing until he had first seen it in a vision of prayer. 

One or two pictures by Rubens, in violent contrast, 
seem to have been painted in a vision of lust. 

Your worn-out enthusiasm will revive again, as you 
stand before a " Holy Family," by Murillo. Joseph 
looks good and reliable, as Joseph ought to look; and 
the child is maturely beautiful, a divine baby ; but, the 
Virgin herself is that sure triumph of art, in a woman's 
face, which unites sense w^ith beauty. Other virgins 
have been pretty or pious, sometimes both, and some- 
times neither ; but this one has the mildness of the 
dove and the wisdom of the serpent, a woman to be 
admired by her own sex, which implies vastly more 
than beauty. Take away all the accessories, leaving 
her alone in the picture, and she would make a perfect 
Puritan maiden, like Priscilla, as she sang the hun- 
dredth psalm to the sound of her spinning-wheel. 

Two pleasant lounging-places, for an empty forenoon 
in London, are the British Museum and the Royal 
Academy, though the immensity of the former is too 
oppressive for comfort. The headless maj'bles are per- 
haps the most satisfying part of it, because one can fit 



102 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

better heads to them in imagination, than the sculp- 
tors did. 

The young men and maidens who come to make 
sketches from them, are not much overawed by their 
grandeur; their behavior plainly indicated that draw- 
ing and flirtation are kindred arts. 

We were a very serious party till the gold ornament 
room enabled us to throw off the accumulated solem- 
nity of these stony halls. Any householder in London 
can give you a ticket to read in the great " Reading 
Room," but it is so intolerably large and lofty, that the 
atmosphere seems to press harder than fifteen pounds 
to the square inch. One would not dare to ask for any 
lighter book than Buckle's History of Civilization. 

Th'e Royal Academy is the yearly expression of 
modern English art. The pictures are so gay-colored 
and bright that it warms the cockles of one's heart to 
look at them, after a long course of the "funeral baked 
meats " of the middle ages in other galleries. This is 
the prevalent feeling, for we saw one or two suburban 
families who meant to make a day of it, and had 
brought their luncheon. They ate it with much relish, 
as English people always eat, and then attacked the 
pictures with renewed strength. 

In the National Gallery there is scarcely a room in 
which some St. Sebastian, stuck all over with arrows, 
as if he were a pin-cushion, would not take away one's 
appetite for vulgar food. 

To me the picture of the year was " E'^e seeing a 
Snake after leaving the Garden." Nobody else seemed 
to care for it, but I suppose every picture, as well as 
every woman, has one admirer. She carries one fair 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 103 

child on her shoulder, and the little black-browed Cain 
is killins the snake. It seemed to nie the artist must 
have been a woman himself in some previous state of 
existence, to have mingled with the beauty of her face 
so much sorrow, deprecation, and loathing. 

The strength of this exhibition lies in its portraits, 
from royalty downward; and I understand that the 
English nobility looks better on canvas than any- 
where else. 



104 BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER VIII. 



BELGIUM. 




** There was a sound of revelry by night, 
And Belgium's capital had gathered there 
Her beauty and her chivalry." 

E Americans like to stay in England as we like 
to visit our grandmother. Everything is ar- 
ranged about her precisely as we saw it last, and will 
be so to the end of her days. She is '-^ set as the ever- 
lasting hills ; " but in the hurries and worries of Amer- 
ican life it is good to think of one settled thing in the 
world, an island where it is " always afternoon." She 
is too old to change, even if she were not convinced 
that the old ways are best. She builds her rail cars 
like carriages, because they will be more private, and 
half the people must ride backwards, whether it agrees 
with them or not. She has never travelled in Amer- 
ica, and has no idea that there is more privacy in sixty 
people sitting with their backs to each other in one car, 
than in four staring into the eyes of another four 
through all her carriages. The animals in the ark 
had no checks for their baggage, and it has never 
occurred to her that any of their descendants would 
need them. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 105 

She calls all the new words, that we coin as easily 
as we breathe, slangy and useless; there were words 
enough before. She is certain that we all talk through 
our noses, and when one of us writes a good book, or 
becomes otherwise distinguished, she puts on ?ier spec- 
tacles and eyes us from head to foot, just as our grand- 
mother would, saying in effect, " Bless me, how you 
have grown ! " 

She is tedious sometimes, but to leave her decorous 
house for the dark ways of the Continent is like a 
second farewell to home. 

Travelling is comparatively easy where people speak 
some sort of English (if not the best), but for women 
taking their lives in their hands, the wolf is waiting 
at every foreign corner. It is true you can always 
disarm him with a piece of money — if your money 
holds out, there is no fear of wolves or anything else 
in Europe. 

There is no pleasant way of getting out of England, 
and the manners of travelling English indicate plainly 
that Providence never intended them to leave their 
island. It is just a choice of evils, and every one is 
sure that he has chosen the worst. 

Our way lay through Harwich, and thence by steamer 
to Antwerp. The German Sea is always as uneasy as 
if it had not half room enough to spread itself, and 
sometimes it is rough and bearish, as the nation which 
gives it its name ; but this route is not a favorite, and 
there is always half a chance to lie down in the little 
cabin and to be as miserable as one likes: in the crowded 
boats between Dover and Calais there is no room even 
to pile up agony. 



106 BEATEN PATHS, OR J 

Our own sufferings were greatly mitigated (since 
"we have always fortitude to bear the misfortunes of 
others ") by watching the rise and fall of rage in a 
handsome young woman at being separated from her 
husband and forced to lie on a mattress on the floor of 
the cabin. Her diamond earrings and travelling suit, 
fearfully and wonderfully made, suggested a bride. 
Angry passions are becoming to some pretty women 
— they give brilliancy to the gray-eyed, neutral-tinted 
sort — but the face of this one clouded over, and 
actually blackened like summer sky before a sudden 
tempest. 

The quiet, sensible-looking man who had evidently 
taken her for better or worse, and was rapidly finding 
it worse, put in a word of deprecation now and then 
in vain, and finally listened in silence till the storm 
was over. 

I have no doubt they kissed and made up afterwards, 
but, when they went off the boat, the husband cast a 
lingering and dubious look behind him, as if, perad ven- 
ture, he had lost in the night some cherished illusion 
of the sweetness of matrimony that he would never 
find again. I fear we women shall never know how 
many funerals of sweet old beliefs men go to in the 
first year of their married life. 

The steamer flounders through the whole night, and 
arrives at Antwerp any time in the forenoon. There 
is no hurry in this latitude ; one <lay is as good as 
another. 

The examination by the custom-house officers, like 
that in all foreign places, amounts to nothing. You 
have only to open your possessions with alacrity, and 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 107 

they will be more eag&r than yourself to close them up 
and have done with it. They cannot bore you half so 
much as you apparently bore them. 

At the Hotel de I'Europe we rejoiced in stately halls 
on the ground floor, but all was not gold that glittered. 
Dante could not have contrived a worse place in his 
Inferno for keeping people awake. A paved driveway 
tunnelled the house, and ended in a court-yard, where 
all the business of the house was carried on. There 
all the bells ring, all the water is pumped out of the 
bowels of the earth, and all the dishes are washed, far 
into the small hours of the night. Horses and carts 
are drawn up at your bedroom door, as if there were a 
cholera patient to be taken out under cover of dark- 
ness. In the morning a great calm settled on that 
court-yard, daylight brought "a poultice to heal the 
blows of sound;" but we shook the dust of Antwerp 
off our feet, and fled into another city before the day 
was over. 

Women and dogs have apparently taken a contract 
to do all the work in Antwerp, and it is hard to tell 
which of them have the most haggard faces. Of all 
animals, hard labor seems to be least becoming to these 
two ; they were meant to exist more for ornament than 
nse, and when they are galled with harness, it outrages 
a natural law. 

The cathedral, the pride of Antwerp, is free to visit- 
ors until noon, when the pictures are unveiled and 
shown for a franc. This is one of the sharp and pious 
tricks of the Catholic churches to make heretics pay 
tithes to them. The great picture is Rubens's "De- 
scent from the Cross," or rather Christ's " Descent from 



108 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

the Cross," for the startling reality of the scene makes 
OTie forget Rubens and his picture altogether. 

The small side-pieces attached to it, of Elisabeth 
greeting Mary, and the Virgin presenting the young 
child to Simeon, take away from the unity of the 
centre. One picture should tell but one story. 

This is almost the only picture by Rubens that does 
not give me the impression of being painted by tlie 
pound. His Virgins and Sabine women are so intoler- 
ably fat as to be a burden to themselves and everybody 
else. Hidden behind a pillar there is a famous head 
of Christ, painted on a block of marble by Leonardo 
da Vinci. It is the face of a man, handsome, refined, 
and sad, but scarcely divine — a sort of Unitarian 
Christ, beautiful enough for love and imitation, but 
Bcarcely powerful enough to save. 

The cathedral at Antwerp is a bright, cheerful place, 
a church to take comfort in as well as to worship, not 
cold and gray like the York Minster, and other Protes- 
tant churches. 

One could take one's knitting and gossip away an 
afternoon under the bedizened figure of the Virgin 
and in the light of lier candles — she is only another 
"woman — without the least sense of disrespect to the 
church ; and this is the chief reason, I think, why the 
Roman Catholic fiiith holds the ignorant mind with 
so tenacious a grasp. The churches are always open, 
with gay colors and processions to enliven them, and 
60 weave religion into the daily life that Protestantism 
seems to offer in exchange only a dry abstraction, that 
one can scarcely understand, much less believe in, till 
he has learned to read and write. The women run in 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 109 

with market baskets on their arms, kneel for a moment, 
and mutter a prayer as familiar to tbem as breathing, 
while at the same time they take note of every stran- 
ger that passes them. They oifer the prayer as Hindoo 
women offer a flower to their god, and think no more 
about it. The one thinks it no more necessary to give 
all her attention to her prayer, than the other to ana- 
lyze her flower botanically. To such a woman it looks 
like hard work to be a Protestant, and make her own 
prayers. 

There is an old and young Antwerp. The high- 
peaked Spanish houses date back to the time when the 
grim Duke of Alva and his soldiers ravaged Belgium ; 
the gay, light houses and boulevards of the new town 
mark the coming in of French fashions. 

The Museum, a famous gallery of old pictures, is a 
weary procession of saints, and martyrs, and virgins, 
in greater or less agony. If you have tears, prepare 
to shed them now ! 

Every thorn, and gaping wound, and drop of blood 
must be plainly visible — these old artists left nothing 
to the imagination. If they could have painted the 
groans of the martyrs, they would have been happy. 
In one picture John the Baptist's head is not only 
offered to Herodias on a charger (we are used to that, 
and don't mind it), but the dripping neck, from which 
it has just been severed, thrusts itself out of the pic- 
ture into your face, to make material for bad dreams 
forevermore. 

A very good butcher was spoiled in many of these 
old Flemish painters. ISTow and then a black-eyed girl 
by Rembrandt, or a sweet St. Catharine disputing with 



no BEATEN PATHS, OR 

the philosophers, breaks the sad monotony; and there 
is one, "Adoration of the Magi," in which a tall camel 
overlooks the scene with a benevolent smile — it is the 
one cheerful face of the gallery. 

The deadly materialism of Catholic art is nowhere 
so plain as in the freedom with which these old paint- 
ers lifted the veil which, the Bible says, cannot be 
lifted even by angels, and attempted to paint God him- 
self. In a famous picture of the dead Christ, a vener- 
able old man looks down on him from the clouds; and 
it gives the mind a certain wrench to realize that this 
is meant to be the first person of the Trinity, whom no 
man shall look upon and live. 

Some of the heathen are more reverent, sitting for 
days to meditate on the sacred name, and never daring 
to utter it. 

Among the other copyists, surrounding famous pic- 
tures to repeat better men's work, is an armless man, 
Mr. Felu, who does easily with his toes all that other 
people do with their fingers. His manner is so natural 
that 1 passed him again and again without noticing 
his peculiarity. He holds his palette with the big 
toe of one foot, and his brush with the other, and his 
copies are not to be distinguished for nicety from the 
originals. 

To go from the Museum to the small private gallery 
" Nottebohm," at ISTo. 3 Rue de Fagot, is like step- 
ping from the chapel of a monastery in the middle 
ages into the brightest salon of Paris. The pictures 
are full of the home-like thoughts of to-day. You have 
not the labor of setting your thoughts back like the 
hands of a clock. Lovers of Ary Schoeffer may here 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. Ill 

bow down to his Faust and Margaret. There have 
been many Margarets, bnt this is the true one, more 
sinned against than sinning. On Faust's chair leans 
the conventional devil, with leering eyes and claws, a 
creature who could never tempt any one to sin, charm 
he never so wisely. If there be a personal devil, as 
some people believe, I do not doubt he is the hand- 
somest man in the world ; otherwise he would not be 
fit for his work. "The devil is a gentleman," said 
King Lear. 

To paint him with a tail and claws, and a mean 
countenance, is to show men more foolish in yielding 
to him than they naturally are. Milton gives him a 
terrible beauty, but artists nearly always give him a 
face that sinners as well as saints would run away 
from. 

Schoeffer treats the " Four Ages of Man " in the 
soft, delicate way peculiarly his own, two little chil- 
dren playing together, a youth whispering in a maiden's 
ear, a man and woman looking lovingly at the play of 
the little ones, and a white-haired couple resting hand 
in hand on the cottage bench after the journey of life. 

He paints that other hackneyed subject^ the "An- 
nunciation," like no one else. All other pictures of the 
Annunciation must needs have a hill-side, with a star 
rising over it, and small bundles of clothes lying on 
their faces, which are supposed to be shepherds ; but 
this picture is just a group of impassioned faces of 
men and women really drinking in "glad tidings of 
great joy." 

In Antwerp we first ran against that curious fashion 
of fastening looking-glasses outside of everj window, 



112 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

that the lady sitting within can see the street panorama 
without any trouble but that of raising her eyes. It 
gives the passer-by an odd sensation to look into re- 
flected faces in these glasses; it is a temptation to 
wink or to smile at them, to make sure whether they 
are reality or only pictures. I saw some very pretty 
and smiling faces so framed outside of German win- 
dows,- prettier there than anywhere else. 

They make a rare black silk in Antwerp, a silk that 
will stand alone. — a dress for a lifetime. In a thrifty 
family it might go down to the third and fourth gener- 
ation ; but who wants a dress to last forever ? 

The country between Antwerp and Brussels is so 
flat that it must have been ironed out in the creation. 
The fields are tilled almost entirely by women, whose 
faces are as wooden as their shoes. 

Brussels, the capital of Belgium, wears a clean and 
finished look, deej^ly grateful to the eye; not a city 
put gradually together by necessity and circumstance, 
but each part fitting into the others as if calculation- 
and good taste had been invited to the birth, and not 
called in when it is too late. All its beauties were 
foreseen facts, not afterthoughts. The parks are in 
the heart of the city, as parks ought to be. A city 
with all its breathing-places outside of it is like a 
human body with lungs that may be put off and on 
like a garment. 

The names of its streets are so well selected as to 
be an oddity — the Royal Street, the Street of Indus- 
try, of Science, of Arts, and of Long Life. I could not 
find out whether the last was. the abode of all Bclgic 
patriarchs or not. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION". 113 

The carved, lace-like front of the aged Hotel de Ville 
looks down on the old city, where all the great deeds 
of its history were done. In the square now used as 
a market, crowded with women and vegetables, there 
is a double statue of Counts Egmont and Horn, who 
were executed on that spot, and the Duke of Alva 
thrust his ugly head out of an upper window above it 
to see the thing well done. 

This Count Egmont was a Catholic noble, but he 
joined the cause of the Protestants because he did not 
approve of their being persecuted. He became their 
ambassador with Count Horn to Philip H., and put 
faith in the kind reception of the king. When Wil- 
liam the Silent and his Protestants fled before the 
Duke of Alva, Egmont could not be persuaded to run 
away with them, though the phlegmatic William be- 
sought him with tears. 

" Adieu, prince sans terre " (without land), said Eg- 
mont when they parted. "Adieu, count sans tete" 
(without a head), retorted William. And one of the 
first events of the campaign was the execution of 
Egmont and Horn; whence sprang the old proverb 
about Philip II., that " the king's dagger is close be- 
hind his smile." In Schiller's play Egmont is repre- 
sented as an interesting bachelor, but he really had a 
wife and nine children, a very respectable condition for 
real life, but not so useful for poetry. 

Behind the Hotel de Ville is a curious statue, called 
" the Spitter," a Triton leaning out of a wall, with a 
stream of water pouring from his mouth. 

At the corner of St. Catharine and De I'Etuve Streets 
(a needle in a haystack would have been more easily 
8 



114 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

found) is the "oldest citizen of Brussels," its palladium, 
a little black statue of a boy, who is also a fountain. 
It is called the "Manikin," and has eight suits of 
clothes for holiday occasions. Louis XVI. bestowed 
on him the order of St. Louis, and an old maid of 
Brussels left him a legacy of a thousand florins. 

Popular delight in him has invented more than one 
legend of his stepping down from his basin and going 
to the aid of his friends. 

There is one gallery of pictures in Brussels so unique 
in character, that they will stay in the memory when 
better things have faded out. This is the Wiertz 
Museum. 

The great picture is the struggle for the body of 
Patroclus. It don't matter who Patroclus was, except 
that he looks very dead indeed ; but the point of the 
picture is the awful strain of two sets of men, both 
bound to conquer or die in the attempt. It is like 
looking on at a duel, when you sympathize with both 
sides. There is passion enough in it for the whole 
battle of Waterloo. This is almost the only picture 
into which the artist has not infused as much oddity 
and bitterness as genius. The oppression of earthly 
authority is grandly shown in a giant grinding a 
woman's shoulder between his teeth, and treading 
helpless mortals under foot. Perhaps the most curious 
idea is expressed in the "Man of the Future," an en- 
larged and noble figure of a man, holding in his big 
hand, and regarding with a pitying smile, the baubles 
that have been most valued by mankind — coins, flags, 
orders, gems, and fire-arms. Two angels look on with 
him in sympathetic wonder. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. H5 

Near this is a figure of Napoleon in the flames of 
hell, while his victims hold out broken limbs to him as 
the trophies of his career. A bitter hatred of Napo- 
leon and French despotism runs through the whole 
gallery ; and yet the artist, against his will, has given to 
Napoleon a face so sad and noble that the sympathy 
of the beholder cleaves to him, and not to those who 
suffered by him. Wiertz was a wonderful flesh paint- 
er. Some of his nude figures of women remind one 
of Lady Mary Montague's conclusion when she saw 
Turkish women in a bath. 

" I was here convinced of the truth of a reflection 
that I have often made, that if it were the fashion to 
go naked, the face would be hardly observed, and 
many noted beauties would have to abdicate their 
thrones." 

Every contrivance is resorted to, to keep up the illu- 
sion of reality. One looks through a knot-hole in a 
board-fence, into a charnel-house, where a woman, too 
soon buried in cholera time, is just forcing up her 
coffin lid, and realizing the horror of her situation. 
Through another hole is seen a mother, driven mad 
by starvation in Napoleon's campaigns, who is cutting 
up her child to boil it in a kettle. The curve of the 
little cheek, half covered in her apron, is the only soft- 
ening touch in the terrible picture. 

But not all these fantasies are horrible. In a corner, 
a painted girl smiles at you, through a crack in a 
painted door, so naturally that you smile back to her 
before you can realize that she is only a picture. In 
another, more lovely than words can tell, a mother, 
just arrived in heaven, recognizes the child that had 
gone before. 



116 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Wiertz was low-born and poor, and the iron early- 
entered his Boul, to reapp(;ar in his pictures, which are 
full of scorn and bitterness towards all the world that 
ealled itself superior to him. He is as vulgarly self- 
conscious in his art, as Byron was in his poetry. He 
was of that order of genius which, in literature, has 
produced Frankenstein, and Yathek, Poe's stories, and 
some of Hawthorne's novels — a select few, out of all 
humanity, who are under a sort of opium influence 
from their birth. They love the world no better than 
the world loves them. 

Sunday is the gayest day of the week in Brussels, 
Between one and two o'clock, all the world goes to 
promenade in the park ; there are concerts all day, and 
balls in the evening. On our Sunday, there was a 
grand military and religious procession in honor of a 
church festival. Hundreds of gorgeous banners were 
carried through the streets, and troops of little girls in 
white carried flowers and wreaths before the Virgin. 
When the "Host" was carried by, under a canopy, by 
a group of priests, all the women fell on their knees in 
the dusty street as suddenly as if struck down by an 
invisible hand. The men were mindful of the knees 
of their trousers, and merely crossed themselves. 

Nearly all the shops were open, and the parks were 
thickly dotted with family groups, who have never 
conceived of a devouter way to spend Sunday than to 
say their prayers in church early in the morning, and 
then to enjoy music, and dancing, and gossip in the 
parks all the rest of the day. No one who sees them 
can doubt that their ignorance is bliss. But this is the 
right side of the tapestry \ the knots and roughnesses 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 117 

are all behind it. The irreverence which makes Sun- 
day a day of pleasure to the rich, makes it also only 
another working day to the very poor. In a Saturday 
evening walk about the city, one of us, oppressed by 
the heat, bethought herself of a linen travelling dress, 
ready made ; but not finding one, the shop-woman in- 
sisted that she would have one made to order and 
delivered at sunrise Monday morning ; but a Puritan 
bringing-up outweighed the heat of the weather and 
the convenience of this arrangement. "And besides," 
said Minerva, after her pious decision, " you know 
nothing wears well that is sewed on Sunday." 

Half a franc (ten cents) gives entrance to a brightly- 
lighted garden, where one may sit at a little table and 
sip ice-cream, listen to the music of the band, and take 
cold, all at the same time, with delightful ease. 

One of the most harrowing chapters of Villette has 
this concert-garden for its scene. In that book, Char- 
lotte Bronte dissects Brussels and its people as coldly 
as an old physician does his work in the hospital. She 
found handsome women there, models for Rubens. 

" With one of those beauties," she says, " I once had 
the honor, and rapture, to be perfectly acquainted. 
The inert force of the deep-settled love she bore her- 
self was wonderful. It could only be surpassed by her 
proud impotency to care for any other living thing." 
If Madame Beck be still living, she must have a ner- 
vous feeling of sitting for her portrait to every pale- 
faced, English governess that teaches in her school. 

In the Place Royale is a noble statue of Godfrey de 
Bouillon, with banner uplifted, the defender of the 
holy sepulchre, who, when the other crusaders would 



118 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

have made "him king of Jerusalem, refused "to wear a 
crown of gold where his Savior had worn a crown of 
thorns." It looks down the Rue de la Madeleine, one 
of the most fascinating streets in the world to women. 
Money burns in your pocket the moment you enter it. 
The shops are small, and their contents might sink 
forty fathoms deep without taking away one jot or 
tittle from the use or comfort of the world ; but beauty 
would suffer a cruel loss. Every second window is 
full of films and cobwebs into which lace-makers have 
wrought many lifetimes. The woman who invented 
lace (I am sure it was a woman) must have caught her 
idea from frost-work on a window ; there is no other 
pattern on earth to make point lace by. The alternate 
windows are full of jewels (not jewelry, which is apt 
to mean wrought gold), but jewels^ in which the value 
and lustre of the stones quite subdue the setting, and 
reduce it to its right place, the frame to the picture. 
But there is no greater mistake than to suppose that 
the prices correspond with the size of the shops. The 
first American lady who passed that way held up both 
hands with astonishment, and said, " How cheap ! " and 
the Bruxellois have been laboring ever since to abate 
her astonishment. 

The English say that Americans, with their lavish 
ways, have spoiled "the Continent" for shopping. 

Ten miles away from Brussels lies the Field of 
Waterloo, "the grave of France," where all Europe 
fought one man, and got the better of him at last by 
accident. 

In an open carriage, we drove through the Forest 
of Soignies, that has stood for ages, and been brought 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 119 

to the very perfection of a forest. Byron calls it the 
Forest of Ardennes, where Roman legions were be- 
wildered. It was in the forest of Arden, in As You 
Like It, that the exiled duke found — 

** tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 

We went into such ecstasies over its shadowy beauty, 
that our stolid old coachman asked us "if we had no 
such forests in our own country ; " and we said, " O yes, 
plenty," hoping that the recording angel would drop a 
tear on our patriotic answer and blot it out, when he 
set it down to our account. The trees stand close 
together like the serried ranks of an army, compact 
and self-contained, till they reach the upper air, and 
then breaking altogether into a lusty growth of dewy 
greenness that makes a cool twilight at their feet. 

"To shame the temples decked 
"Ry skill of earthly architect, 
Nature herself, it seemed, would raise 
A minster to her Maker's praise." 

The village of Waterloo was Wellington's head- 
quarters from the 17th to the 19th of June, 1815, the 
days of the battle. Here the guides waylay you like 
bandits. We took one whose father had fought on 
the French side (I cannot swear that this is not a 
peculiarity of all their fathers), and who described the 
battle with French enthusiasm. At Waterloo, a woman 
came out of the inn with a pail of water, squeezed a 
wet sponge on the foreheads and washed the feet of 
the horses. 



120 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

The latter looked much finer animals than the crowd 
of men who stood about, holding up the door-posts, 
while a woman did their work. On the way to the 
"Field" they show you a pretentious monument, 
erected by Lord Anglesea to a leg that, he lost in 
the battle. On his plan, one might fill up a grave- 
yard, and yet keep one's head above ground. Such 
men should have lachrymals to keep their tears in. 
The great plains of Belgium seem made on purpose 
for the mancBuvres of hostile armies, giving advantage 
to neither side. The monument, in the shape of a cir- 
cular mound, one hundred and fifty feet high, is raist d 
on the spot where the Prince of Orange was wounded. 
It is surmounted by a lion, cast from the French can- 
non taken by the allies ; but no one ever really sees 
that lion, for it is too high up to be distinctly visible 
from the plain, and too near when one has scaled the 
mound. A wiry little Scotch-looking woman keeps 
the " Museum Hotel," where a great treasure of skulls 
and sword-blades is shown ; and she does so bewilder 
and obfuscate the minds of her visitors with accounts 
of her uncle's, Sergeant Cotton, behavior in the battle, 
that I am not certain to this day whether it was Ser- 
geant Cotton or the "Iron Duke" who said, "Up, 
guards, and at them ! " The French army was so 
glorious in failure, that it lays balm to the national 
heart to this day. When Napoleon would have fought 
at the head of the " Old Guard," Marshal Soult turned 
back his horse's head with the protest, "Sire, the 
enemy have been fortunate enough already." All lov- 
ers of Napoleon must deeply regret this little mistake 
of Marshal Soult's. The great man should have died, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 121 

but never surrendered. The epic of his life would 
then have been rounded with a true French period, 
instead of six years of snarling decay on the rock of 
St. Helena. 

Many reasons have been given for the fall of Napo- 
leon ; only this one is dear to me — "a poor thing, sir, 
but mine own." He compassed a throne easily enough, 
but had not eyes to see the power that is always 
behind it. Through life he needlessly and wantonly 
affronted the self-love of women. He found fault with 
the dresses of the ladies of his court — an insult that 
some women take more to heart than a slur on their 
beauty or reputation. He drove away Madame de 
Stael when she would have adored him, and so secured 
an enemy always fighting under cover. He outraged 
the whole sex by divorcing Josephine, and when he 
married a princess of the house of Austria, counting 
on her influence with her father, the simplest of women 
could have told him that it was useless, when she had 
a step-mother. And he suffered Maria Louisa to offend 
that step-mother by outshining her in diamonds, and 
other magnificence, when he held a review of royalty 
at Dresden. His minister Talleyrand, whose career is 
nearly as wonderful as his own, always heartily despised 
women, but never overlooked their influence. At Se- 
dan, six miles from Waterloo, was a French failure of 
another color. There, the third Napoleon would have 
been almost as deeply indebted as his uncle to a friend- 
ly bullet in his back. 

Byron has fought the battle over again in poetry in 
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Victor Hugo in prose 
in Les Miserables. Victor Hugo was on the French 



122 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

side, the gallant, desperate side, and Byron wrote on 
his own side, which was neither French nor English. 
Thackeray makes some " copy " out of it too, in his 
Vanity Fair, when all the English people were fleeing 
for their lives out of Brussels. 

In the Museum at South Kensington, near London, 
there is a picture, by Sir Edwin Landseer, of a green, 
flat bit of country, and in the foreground are two 
figures on horseback. The tall, martial, old man with 
high cheek-bones and Roman nose is the Duke of 
Wellington, pointing out to the pretty woman with 
him the spot where the "red rain" fell fastest, and the 
motto on the frame is Southey's line, — 

" But 'twas a famous victory." 

The whole of Belgium has the serene and prosperous 
air of that picture. It is peaceful as a great establish- 
ment with a good housekeeper at its head ; no mean 
economies, and yet nothing wasted. Leopold I. was a 
housekeeper both good and wise. Had not his first 
wife, Princess Charlotte of England, died, and made 
room for Victoria on the throne of England, he might 
have lounged his life away as Prince Consort, and 
never developed his talent for reigning. 

In 1848, when the ferment of French revolution 
again stirred all Europe, he did a very rare and won- 
derful thing. He put his kingship to vote among his 
subjects, and was triumphantly elected to a "second 
term." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 123 



CHAPTER IX. 

GERMANY. 

*'Thou knowest the story of her ring, 
How, when the court went back to Aix, 
Fastrada died ; and how the king 
Sat watching by her, night and day, 
Till, into one of the blue lakes 
That water that delicious land, 
They cast the ring drawn from her hand ; 
And the great monarch sat serene 
And sad beside the fated shore, 
Nor left the land forevermore." 

MORNING train from Brussels to Cologne gave 
us two or three afternoon hours in Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle, or Aachen, as the Germans call it, where the Ger- 
man emperors were crowned for ages. Charlemagne 
loved it well even before "Fastrada died;" and he 
was buried there, sitting in a golden chair, clad in his 
royal robes, and holding a sceptre in his hand. 

The ancient chronicles make out Charlemagne to 
have been a genial old fellow, a good friend to have in 
any century. He dabbled in literature, compiling the 
first French grammar, somewhat as Solomon built the 
temple — for his fingers were so stiff with holding the 
Bword that he could never learn to write, but signed 




124 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

his decrees by clipping his sword hilt in ink and press- 
ing it on the paper. 

He had an uncommon love for his daughters, who 
took advantage of it, as daughters always do. His 
English secretary, Eberhard, had fallen in love with 
one of them, named Emma, and made secret visits to 
her bower, climbing in. through the window. One 
night, while the lovers held sweet converse, there was 
a light fall of snow in the court-yard, and the footsteps 
of Eberhard would be sure to be tracked from Emma's 
window. Kings' daughters were broad-shouldered and 
strong women in those days, and Emma carried her 
lover on her shoulders, safe out of harm's way. Char- 
lemagne was sitting at a window which overlooked this 
little by-play, and it opened his fatherly heart into con- 
sent to their marriage. Such stories, cropping out of 
those warlike times, like the white "edelweiss" out of 
sterile mountain tops, show that changes may come iu 
clothes and manners, bat never to the hearts of young 
men and maidens. 

Once in seven years, they show to adoring crowds in 
Aix-la-Chapelle the dress that the Virgin wore when 
Christ was born, and the swaddling-l^ands of the infant. 
These are among the best-attested relics of the Roman 
Catholic church, having been given by the Patriarch 
of Jerusalem to Charlemagne ; but if the Virgin was 
the thrifty woman, in poor circumstances, that I take 
her for, those clothes must have been cut up for the 
younger children long before the patriarch was ever 
heard of. They do not show them oftener for fear of 
wearing them out. Many cures have been wrought by 
merely touching this blessed trash. 1 suppose the 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 125 

elderly priests become so used to playing their parts in 
these little Romish theatricals, that it is second nature ; 
but the younger ones must suffer torture from sup- 
pressed laughter when they hold up these sacred rags 
for the adoration of the crowd. It is said the Roman 
augurs could not perform their rites in their own com- 
pany, because they laughed in each other's faces ; and 
nothing makes the Catholic mummeries respectable but 
the vast numbers who believe in them. A small and 
persecuted sect, who cherished such nonsense in its. 
midst, would be borne down and wijied out by the de- 
.rision of all the world. 

Cologne comes from the Roman name "colonia;" 
and if cleanliness be next to godliness, it is very far off 
from both. The beauty of its cathedral gives credit 
to the diabolical legend that hangs about it. It is said 
the architect sold his soul to Satan for the plan of the 
church ; but he took so much time in building it, that 
his creditor waxed impatient, and claimed his due be- 
fore the work was done; so that the cathedral, begun 
in 1248, has never been, and can never be finished. A 
more practical reason is, that there has never been 
money enough forthcoming for the purpose. " Church 
work is slow — church work is slow," said Sir Roger 
de Coverley. 

It has been said that the cloisters are too low for the 
nave, thus making a certain disproportion ; but I verily 
believe there are people who would carp at the "golden 
streets," because they were not paved with diamonds. 

One could half believe that it came straight from 
heaven as a free gift to worshipping souls, if the smell 
of candles, and the tawdry images of the Virgin dressed 



126 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

up with spangles, did not prove it a very human piece 
of work after all. In the heart of it is a little jewelry- 
shop, otherwise the golden shrine of the "Three Kings," 
or Magi, " Caspar, Melchior, and Baltasar," who came 
to worship the infant Jesus, bringing frankincense and 
myrrh. 

The skeletons were brought from the East by the 
Empress Helena, mother of Constantine. The skulls 
are bound with diamonds, and the whole shrine is stud- 
ded thick with glowing rubies, and sapphires, and all 
manner of precious stones. It must forever touch the 
feminine heart to see such glorious things wasted on a 
box of bones (which may have belonged to three Arab 
camel-drivers), when they might be wrought into brace- 
lets and necklaces. The treasury is rich in jewelled 
crosses, and gold vases, used in rare ecclesiastical pa- 
geants. A little box studded with great pearls, which, 
one can see with half an eye, were intended by nature 
for ear-rings, holds a thorn of the true crown; but the 
choicest things in the collection are two links of the 
chain that bound St. Peter at Jerusalem when the 
angel released him out of prison. They do not tell 
you (perhaps heretics are unworthy to hear it) whether 
the angel • or St. Peter himself preserved them as a 
souvenir of his deliverance. 

In a little chapel behind the high altar is a picture 
of the adoration of the Magi, so old that no man caij 
guess at the name of the artist; but still so beaming 
with genius, that his name ought to be a household 
word. Goethe called it "the axis of the arts;" but I 
hope ray readers will know better than I do what he 
meant by it. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 127 

Through many narrow streets, like a network of 
sewers, with a new smell waiting for us at every cor- 
ner, we sought the Church of St. Ursula, that luckless 
Scottish princess, who, returning from her pilgrimage 
to Rome, with a modest train of eleven thousand vir- 
gins, was here set upon and slain by the heathen Huns. 

The legend is that, while high mass was being cele- 
brated by the Archbishop of Cologne, a white dove 
flew down three times to one spot, and when the 
ground was opened, the bones of a great multitude 
were found, with inscriptions showing sufficiently to 
devout minds that they were the remains of St. Ursula 
and her train. These bones are now arranged inside 
the walls of her church, two feet deep, and may be 
reverently peeped at through small gratings. 

In stiff old pictures, St. Ursula and her betrothed 
w^lk hand in hand along a river bank strewn with 
heads and arms, cut off by the Huns, and they are 
themselves skewered by two heathen swords; but 
being together and true lovers, they don't seem to no- 
tice such small inconveniences in the least ; let a picture 
be ever so stiff and ill-painted, this bit of love and pa- 
thos would condone it ! 

Sceptical Protestants dare to laugh at this sweet old 
story, because some of the bones are those of men, and 
others of animals; but the legend expressly says that 
some of the train were soldiers; the word virgin has 
no gender, and St. Paul made no distinction. Sir Gala- 
bad was a "maiden knight" — 

*' I never felt the kiss of love. 
Nor maiden's hand in mine, 
So keep I fair through faith and prayer, 
A virgin, heart in work and will." 



128 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Touching the bones of animals found with the others, 
many of the elderly virgins may have had lap-dogs. 
So pretty and sad a story ought not to be wiped out 
of history for want of a trifle of probability. 

In a little room, that one enters for a sixpence, the 
bones are artistically arranged in all sorts of figures 
and arabesques, and rows of skulls are set on shelves, 
done up in red needle-work, as if every virgin of them 
had died of the toothache. Here, too, is one of the 
identical jars in which water was turned into wine, at 
the marriage in Can a of Galilee. It is of alabaster, 
much stained and battered, as anything or anybody 
naturally would be, after being knocked about for 
eighteen hundred years. There are some old boxes of 
trinkets, beads, and the like, found with the bones, and 
a tooth belonging to St. ApoUonia. Being a hollow 
one, she was well rid of it. 

If I made any distant allusion to any of the seventy- 
two smells which Coleridge counted in Cologne, in the 
hearing of our guide, he always muttered something 
about its being a Roman city, as if that august people 
had left all these evil odors behind them, when they 
declined and fell. Many sins have been laid to their 
charge, but none so heinous as this. This guide pro- 
fessed to speak English, but he very appropriately pro- 
nounced it "anguish." It was anguish to hear him. 
It is an instance of the law of compensation, and also 
of the meeting of extremes, that in this tainted city is 
to be found the true Farina cologne. There are about 
forty shops, each one of which is the sole and only 
place where it is sold. Johann Maria, himself, pro- 
fessed to live at " No. 4 Inlichplatz ; " and so sinister 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 129 

was the droop in his left eye, as he surveyed our seven 
innocent countenances, that we were fain to take what- 
ever he gave us, asking no questions. 

After a reeking forenoon in Cologne, it was like " the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land" to find our- 
selves on a steamer on the Rhine, that " exulting and 
abounding river," which Germans love so well that 
they name it "Father Rhine." Tourists who think they 
waste time if they are not always seeing something, usu- 
ally make the journey by rail to Bonn, and take boat there, 
as the scenery called "j^/ie" does not begin till one has 
passed that place ; bat they make a great mistake. 

An afternoon of plain sailing, with a cool wind blow- 
ing in my face, gave my strained enthusiasm time to 
rest after the glories of Cologne Cathedral. It was 
eager as ever when we landed at the little village of 
Koenigs winter, and challenged the first sentinel of the 
enchanted garden of the Rhine, the "castled crag, of 
Drachenfels." 

We took refuge from the white glare of heat in the 
first hotel we could find; but the place of places to 
spend the night, and see the sun rise, is at a little 
bird's nest of an inn on the crag itself. The royal way 
of ascent is by carriage ; but for an equal measure of 
hard work and pure fun, there is nothing like a donkey- 
ride, and the total depravity of a donkey-boy. 

The view from the Drachenfels (dragon-rock) is not 
so rarely beautiful as from others of the Rhine heights ; 
but to us it was the first, and the first draught of delight 
is always the sweetest. The first child, to a mother, is 
always the handsomest, and one's first love can never 
be improved upon, 
9 



130 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Travellers often go down the Rhine, beginning with 
its heights, and following it until it flattens into Dutch 
placidity ; but we began at the lowest step, and went 
up the stairs of its beauty till our last look was in the 
face of its perfection. It was old Plato's notion that, 
when one was moved by loveliness, the wings of the 
soul begin to swell ; and yet the ancient owners of this 
castle founded on a rock had no corner in their souls 
that swelled for anything but plunder. The fields that 
used to smoke under their ravages, now stretch away 
in little right-angled patches of many-shaded green. It 
has reminded some one of a patchwork bed-quilt ; but 
to me it was like a vast mosaic of green stones, emerald, 
and chrysoprase, and beryl, with now and then a sere 
and yellow agate. 

In pagan days a horrible dragon, breathing fire and 
smoke, lived on the Drachenfels (one sees his cave, 
coming up), to whose rapacity the people ofiTered hu- 
man victims. A young girl, whose beauty had made a 
quarrel between two knights, was oflfered to the dragon 
by way of settling the matter. As she was tied trem- 
bling to a tree, and the dragon rushed at her, she held 
up a crucifix, which so affrighted him, that, with a great 
hissing, he plunged over the precipice, and so made an 
end of himself. 

This miracle made good Christians of all the heathen 
in the neighborhood ; and whether the girl married one 
or both of the knights the legend saith not. We man- 
age these things better in the nineteenth century. 

Two maidens are prone to quarrel over one knight, 
who straightway marries another woman, who does not 
love him, but wants a home, so that it is the man who 
is given to the dragon after all. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 131 

The Drachenfels is a spur of the Siebengebirge, or 
" Seven Mountains," which were the scene of the Nie- 
belungenlied — the Iliad and Odyssey of Germany. It 
is a vast mine of poetry only partially worked. Wil- 
liam Morris, in his Earthly Paradise, has sunk the 
latest shaft in it. The story of the "Niebelungen," iu 
very short hand, is somewhat like this. Seigfried, the 
hero, kills a dragon ; and, being bathed in its blood, is 
rendered invulnerable except in one small spot on liis 
back, where a leaf fell during the bath. He marries 
Chrimhilde, fairest among women, and having gone 
over, body and soul, to his wife's family, as most men 
do who love their wives, he goes with Gunther, his 
brother-in-law, to Iceland, to help him court a princess 
called Brunehaut. This young woman is one of the 
strong-minded women of that period, and will marry 
no one who cannot overcome her in single combat. 
She has slain many suitors, but Seigfried puts on his 
magic cap, which makes him invisible, and gives him 
the strength of twelve men ; with his aid Gunther gets 
the victory and marries the princess. But Brunehaut 
has not got over the love of fighting; and when she 
has only her husband to deal with, easily binds him 
with cords, and hangs him on a nail against the wall. 

Gunther must have been greatly more or less than a 
man and a descendant of Adam, if he did not make 
haste to lay the blame of Brunehaut's first defeat on 
Seigfried. 

By way of retaliation Brunehaut bribes an old war- 
rior named Hagen, who is in Chrimhilde's confidence, 
to find out from her where Seigfried is vulnerable. 
On the plea of guarding him from all perils, Hagen per- 



132 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

suacles Cbrimhilde to embroider a leaf on his doublet 
over the fatal spot. Then Hagen seizes liis opportu- 
nity, when Seigfried is stooping to drink at a spring, 
and plunges a dagger through tlie leaf. The widowed 
Chrimhilde now gives her days and nights to revenge^ 
and finally marries the king of the Huns on condition 
of his assisting her in her great object. After years of 
waiting, Gunther and Brunehaut (who has been some- 
what " weeded of her folly "), Hagen, and all her fol- 
lowers, come to make Chrimhilde a friendly visit, and 
the poem ends with a grand slaughter of all concerned. 
The moral of all this seems to be (though it is not set 
down in the book), that no wdse man will ever let his 
wife know where his w^eak spot is. 

A little below the Drachenfels is the castle of Ro- 
landseck and the island convent of Nonnenworth, held 
together by the airy bridge of a little love story, sad as 
it is sweet. 

Roland fell in love with the fair Hildegunde, but this 
did not hinder his going to the wars. News came of 
his death, and the maiden fled, in her despair, to the 
convent of Nonnenworth. The day after she had 
taken the veil, Roland returned safe and well, and 
afterwards w^asted his life in watching the convent be- 
low his tower, that hid his treasure. 

" Gazing downward to the convent, 
Hour on hour he passed, 
Watching still his lady's lattice, 
Till it oped at last." 

One day he saw a funeral procession wind among 
the trees of the island, and the sixth sense — that only 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 133 

lovers have ^ told him that Hildegimde was dead, and 
his watching was soon over. 

" There a corse they found him sitting 
Once when day returned; 
Still his pale and placid features 
To the lattice turned." 

This story demonstrates the superior comfort of the 
Protestant way of living and thinking. If Hildegunde 
had had no convent to flee to, in her despair she would 
have wrung her hands and torn her hair in her father's 
house until Roland came home ; and if he had never 
returned, the worst that would have befallen her would 
have been to be an old maid, and bring up her nieces 
and nephews. It was a sorrowful choice of evils those 
Catholic maidens liad, in the middle ages, to marry or 
to iJfO into a convent. It is not the least of the bless- 
ings of Protestantism, that it opened another road for 
women to travel in, if they prefer it. 

As we sail past Oberwinter, the "Seven Mountains" 
pose themselves for one long picture — 

" A blending of all beauties, streams, and dells, 
Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine." 

The Rhine has set up an altar there on which to offer 
his first fruits. 

Farther up is the ruined castle of Hammerstein, 
named from Charles Martel, the Hammer. Henry IV. 
of Germany made a great fight against that most over- 
bearing of popes, Gregory VII. ; and when he brought 
himself to ask forgiveness, he was kept waiting three 
days, clothed in sackcloth, before he received it. This 
was. overdoing it, according to papal habit in all ages; 



134 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

the war broke out again, and Henry took refnge and 
long held out against his enemies in this now roofless 
castle of Hammerstein. 

Andernach has a tall watch-tower 'and a volcanic 
foundation. The people live by their quarries, one of 
which gives millstones; another, the water cement used 
by the Dutch to give solidity to their dikes; and a 
third, a stone for coffins, which absorbs the moisture of 
the body. The Romans called these coffins "sarcoph- 
agi," flesh-consumers. 

Neuwied has a look of home with its clean white- 
painted houses. The Moravian Brethren have settled 
here in great numbers; they live somewhat after the 
fashion of Shakers in America, except (a great except) 
that marriage is permitted, and, on withdrawal, two 
years' frugal support is allowed; a member is never 
received a second time ; under this rule, it is almost 
unheard of in the history of the community that any 
one should leave them. 

They have a curious and fascinating custom of draw- 
ing lots in any emergency, and trusting to Providence 
for the event. I suppose it meets that yearning for 
moral stimulant which other people satisfy with gam- 
bling. Not far from Neuwied is the monument to 
Hoche, a young French general, who was thought to 
show more promise than Napoleon himself. Byron 
wrote for him the most perfect of epitaphs, — 

" His mourners were two hosts — his friends and foes," — 

unless that to Marceau, also buried on the Rhine shore, 

may rival it, — 

'« He had kept 
The whiteness of his soul, and thus men wept for him." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 135 



CHAPTER X. 



THE EHINE. 



" 0, the pride of the German heart in this noble river! By 
Heavens, if I were a German, I would be proud of it, too ; and of 
the clustering grapes that hang about its temples as it reels on- 
ward through vineyards, in a triumphant march, like Bacchus, 
crowned and drunken. " — Longfellow's Hyperion. 

IT was on the Rhine steamer, after leaving Cologne, 
that our St. Ursula fell among thieves, worse 
heathen than their ancestors, who were satisfied 
with taking life ; but these modern Huns would have 
our money, too. They never knew when they had 
been fairly paid ; and when St. Ursula would have en- 
lightened them in plain English, and good French, and 
scholarly German (I am not sure that she did not 
try them with "small Latin and less Greek"), they 
fell back on stupidity and Low Dutch ; and yet these 
same men, when she ordered anything to eat, were 
perfect polyglots of language. The story of the build- 
ing of Babel is a mythical matter at home, but in Eu- 
rope, where good English scolding is a waste of breath, 
it seems an afiair of yesterday when every man asked 
his neighbor for a hammer or a nail, and found no one 
to understand him. 



136 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

In Dr. Rimmer's picture of the master builder of the 
Tower of Babel, which once sounded so outlandish, 
the traveller in Germany descries a man and a brother. 

German money is a conundrum that one may as well 
give up, to begin with. Heine said it was a great help 
to an education to be born to those nouns that make 
their accusative in wm, and the same thing applies to 
the groschen and kroitzers of his national money. In 
one province a groschen is three cents, in another 
more, and in another less ; that is, a groschen is not al- 
ways a groschen, and great quantities of small coin are 
just nickel buttons, with no inscription at all. It takes 
the faith that will remove mountains to believe that 
they have any vahie. 

The buyer may say, " It is naught, it is naught," but 
travellers must go by what the seller says,- and the sell- 
er is sure to cheat in giving change. The only remedy 
is to spend as little as possible on German soil. The 
careful phrases culled out of German grammars, are of 
very little use in withstanding or understanding the 
villanous patois spoken by guides and porters. 

Our second day on the Rhine landed us at Coblentz. 
One does not need to be told that the name comes 
from the Latin word " confluentia," the confluence of 
the Rhine and the " blue Moselle." Every wind that 
blows over it tells us that the Romans have been there 
before us. There is no need of olfactory nerves in 
these old walled towns. A little girl once said she 
''''heard a smell;" and you can heai\ and taste^ and 
almost see those evil odors. 

When Dr. Way land laid down the law that you 
could not imagine a smell, he meant those of Cologne' 



A WOMAN'S VACATION-. 137 

and Coblentz. The Queen of Prussia has a palace 
there, and the "Queen's Gardens " make a fringe of 
lovehness along the river bank. On the way, the 
coachman shows you a stone sarcasm, in the shape of a 
pillar, erected before the disastrous Russian campaign 
of Napoleon, with an inscription in which French suc- 
cess is taken for granted. When the Napoleonic tide 
turned the wrong way in this very campaign, — for Fate 
does not like being anticipated, — the Russian com- 
mandant of Coblentz let the pillar stand, merely adding 
to the inscription a " Seen and approved," with his 
signature, as if he had vised a passport. Everybody 
crosses the bridge of boats to visit Ehrenbreitstein, 
"the broad stone of honor," the Gibraltar of Germany. 
Nature and men have worked together to make it 
the most tremendous scowl that the face of one coun- 
try can wear towards another. It has seen woise days, 
but never better ones than now. The French had pos- 
session of it once, 

*' And laid those proud roofs bare to summer rain, 
On which the iron shower had poured in vain." 

The garrison can only be reduced by starvation, and 
it once held out so long that cat flesh was twenty-five 
cents a pound. The dungeons and other secrets of 
tlie fortress used to oj^en to a fee; but since the last 
war nothing is shown for love or money, except the 
view from the battlements. French eyes are now so 
sharpened by wrath and shame, that they would al- 
most penetrate a stone wall to find out a weak spot in 
this rock of defence. 



138 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

The German soldiers seem rather small men, but 
well-built and miraculously drilled, with more intelli- 
gent faces than one sees in the English army. A 
little below Coblentz is Stolzenfels (proud rock). The 
Coblentzers long offered it for sale for seventy thalers, 
and finally made a present of it to the crown prince, 
who restored it to its first estate. The great paint- 
ing on the outside, visible from the steamer, chronicles 
the visit of an English princess, who was entertained 
there. One* of its wings was long inhabited by a party 
of alchemists, who sought for the philosopher's stone, 
and the elixir of life, long after other people had given 
them up for lost. After this, villages lie " thick as 
leaves in Vallombrosa" along the edge of the river^ 
pleasant places to be buried in. 

Every one has its castle and its legend of the lovely 
maiden, whom somebody loved or did not love; the 
end is sure to be tragic enough in either case. Long- 
fellow has told the story of "The Brothers" Sternberg 
and Liebenstein, in Hyperion. It sings itself in the 
mind like an old ballad. 

Rheinfels is the most imposing ruin on the river, but 
not the most graceful or romantic. In 1692 a Fi-ench 
marshal promised it to Louis XIY. for a Christmas 
present ; but this old French brag, like many later ones, 
came to nothing. 

Then comes the rock of the "Lorelei," four hundred 
and forty-seven feet high, the old home of a siren, with 
a star on her forehead and a harp in her hand, who 
lured men to destruction in her. whirlpool, and then 
chanted their death-sonoj. 

The rock was said, in the old time, to echo fifteen 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 139 

times ; but men are grown hard to lure, and the Lorelei 
is tired of it : her rock now sends back but one echo. 
It has been tunnelled, too, by the railroad ; even "Ma- 
riana" would have found it hard work to be romantic 
in the " moated grange," if a train of cars had passed 
through the cellar of it. Hood says the echo is now, 
"Take care of your pocket ; take care of your pocket." 
Oberweisel, the Roman Vesalia, is said to be a pleas- 
ant place to lose a day in, if one has them in plenty. 
The castle of Schoenberg crowns it, and in the river at 
its feet are groups of rocks called the " Seven Sisters." 
Some one has put the legend into lively verses, in this 
wise : — 

" The castle of Schoenberg was Icifty and fair, 
And seven .countesses ruled there ; 
Lovely, and noble, and wealthy, I trow; 
Every sister had suitors enow. 
Crowned duke and belted knight 
Sighed at the feet of these ladies bright; 
And they whispered hope to every one, 
While they vowed in their hearts they would have none. 

Gentles, list to the tale I tell; 
'Tis many a year since this befell ; 
Women are altered now, I ween. 
And never say what they do not mean. 

At the castle of Schoenberg, 'twas merriment all ; 
There was dancing in bower, and feasting in hall ; 
They ran at the ring in the tilt-yard gay, 
And the mon;ents flew faster than thought away; 
But not only moments, — the days fled too. 
And they were but as when the first came to woo ; 
And spoke they of marriage or bliss deferred, 
They were silenced by laughter and scornful word. 



140 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Gentles, list to the tale I tell; 
'Tis many a year since this befell ; 
And ladies now so mildly reign, 
They never sport with a lover's pain. 

Knight looked upon knight with an evil eye ; 
Each fancied a favored rival nigh; 
And darker every day they frowned, 
And sharper still the taunt went round, 
Till swords were drawn, and lance in rest, 
And the blood ran down from each noble breast; 
While the sisters sat in their chairs of gold. 
And smiled at the fall of their champions bold. 

Gentles, list to the tale I tell ; 
'Tis many a year since this befell ; 
Times have changed, we must allow j 
Countesses are not so cruel now. 

Morning dawned on Schoenberg's towers, 
But the sisters were not in their wonted bowers ; 
Their damsels sought them the castle o'er, 
* But upon earth they were seen no more. 
Seven rocks are in the tide, 
Oberweisel's walls beside. 
Baring their cold brows to heaven : 
They are called * The Sisters Seven.* 

Gentles, list to the tale I tell ; 
'Tis many a year since this befell ; 
And ladies now may love deride, 
And their suitors alone be petrified." 

The Falz, a castle in the middle of the river, stands 
like a sentinel with presented arms. It was built to 
challenge and demand tribute of every boat that 
passed it. 

It was an old custom that the wives of the Counts 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. . 141 

Palatine mast pass some time in this castle, previous 
to becoming mothers. The reason for this custom it 
is difficult to fathom, unless there were not wars and 
rumors of wars enough to keep up their spirits in their 
mountain castles. 

Near Bacharach is a rock that is only seen w^hen 
the river is very low. The peasants hold a high fes- 
tival when it appears, for it is the unfailing signal of 
a noble vintage on that year. 

*' At Bacharach, on the Rhine, 
At Hochheim, on the Main, 
And at Wurzberg, on the Stein, 
Grow the three best kinds of wine." 

We are now among the old robber castles, thirty- 
two of which used to demand tribute of every passing 
boat. A merchant of those days must have been a 
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. On a lit- 
tle green island that the steamer turns out for, stands 
the "Mouse Tower." An inhuman bishop, named 
Hatto, bought up all the wheat, in order to sell it 
dear, and when the people complained, he enticed 
them into a barn, and burnt them up. 

*'I' faith, 'tis an excellent bonfire," quoth he, 
" And the country is greatly obliged to me, 
For ridding it in these times forlorn, 
Of rats that only consume the corn." 

But out of the ashes of his victims came swarms 
of rats, that chased him from one place to another, un- 
til he fled to an island in the Rhine, and built the 
Mouse Tower; but the rats swam over after him. 



142 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

** Down on his knees the bishop fell, 
And faster and faster his beads did he tell, 
As louder and louder, drawing near. 
The saw of their teeth without he could hear. 

And in at the windows, and in at the door. 

And through the walls in thousands they pour, 

And down through the ceiling, and up through the floor, 

From the right and left, from behind and before, 

From within and without, from above and below, 

And all at once to the bishop they go. 

They have whetted their teeth against the stones, • 
And now they pick the bishop's bones ; 
They gnawed the flesh from every limb. 
For they were sent to do judgment on him." 

At Bingen the river is supposed to have broken 
the mountain chain that once bound it, as there are 
signs that it was once a great lake, stretching even 
to Basle. Poetry has made Bingen famous, with its 
poor soldier dying in Algiers. It is one of the " oldest 
inhabitants " of reading books. After Bingen, the vil- 
lages grow rare, and the hills more steep, but the vine- 
yards never cease. They date back to Charlemagne, 
who found that the snow melted sooner on these hill- 
sides than anywhere else. There is a legend that his 
favorite vineyards were at Winkel, and that he visits 
them once every year, and blesses them. 

*' And then from the home that he still loves so well. 
He returns to the tomb that's in Aix-la-Chapelle, 
There to slumber in peace till the old year is over. 
And the vineyards again woo him back like a lover.'* 

The huge basaltic rocks, that seem to have grudged 
the passage of the river,, have terraces built on their 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 143 

steep sides, where only a lean goat would care to climb, 
and sometimes holes are blasted into them, that will 
hold just soil enough to nourish a vine. This soil is 
carried up in baskets, chiefly on the backs of women ; 
and when a hard rain washes it down, the work has all 
to be done over again. Woman's work is never done 
anywhere. These Rhenish peasant women are strong, 
straiirht-limbed beasts of burden, nothing more nor less. 
Where all the men are trained to be soldiers, all the 
women must perforce be slaves. Byron will have it, 

that — 

" Peasant girls, with deep-blue eyes, 

And hands which offer early flowers, 

Walk smiling o'er this paradise." 

They have blue eyes, it is true, blue as turquoises ; 
but they are tanned a red brown by the sun, and even 
turquoises set in copper lose all their beauty. I have 
never seen a German woman who would " shake the 
saintship of an anchorite," or of any other man ; but 
travelling poets must be poetical, if truth is put to the 
sword. 

Bismarck is not a favorite with German women. In 
the late war he made a burnt-offering of one hundred 
and thirty thousand soldiers, and left desolate the same 
number of widows and maidens. A man who takes 
the responsibility of making old maids by the hun- 
dred thousand, must be brave indeed. Our landlady 
at Coblentz, a buxom little widow, whose husband was 
killed at Sedan, said, with a long-drawn sigh, "Bis- 
marck will die some time, please God ! " 

The Johannesberg grapes are not gathered until dead 
ripe, and those that fall on the ground are picked up 



144 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

with little wooden forks, made for the purpose. The 
wine was not particularly famous until the Rothschilds 
got possession of the vineyard, and with Jewish acute- 
ness, sold only a limited quantity every year, while 
tbey hired clever pens to write up its virtues. 

Near Mayence we met one of those enormous rafts — 
water-villages — made from the mountain timber, and 
floated down to Holland. Boatmen and their families, 
cattle and fowls, live on them, sometimes to the num- 
ber of three or four hundred. 

Mayence has a great cathedral, a favorite of fire, hav- 
ing been burned and restored six times; but it is chiefly 
famous as being tlie city where Gutenberg brought to 
perfection the art that makes men immortal, and print- 
ed his first Bible. He beggared himself, and led the 
usual hard life of inventors; but alter death it was 
made up to him in statues. 

I think it was here that, while one of his Bibles was 
in type, a woman substituted the word "narr" (fool), 
for "herr" (lord), in the verse about husband and 
wife, which says, " And he shall be her lord," so that it 
read, "and he shall be her fool." I wonder if the op- 
pressed creature thought that the Bible's saying so 
would make it so. The mistake was discovered in 
time, and the woman came to German grief, which 
must be more poignant than any other. 

Mayence was the home of Frauenlob, a Minnesinger, 
who spent his whole life in singing the praises of wo- 
men, and when he died his body was borne to the 
tomb by six lovely maidens. His motto was, " He who 
possesses the love of a noble woman will hold all vice 
iu scorn." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION', 145 

The Mastersingers flourished in Mayence, too — a 
queer guild of "batchers and bakers, and candlestick- 
makers," who put verses together over their work, and 
insisted on naming it poetry. They are to the Minne- 
singers as cuckoos and owls to nightingales. 

" As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he too the mystic rhyme. 
And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's 
chime." 

We left the Rhine at Mayence, though we caught a 
glimpse of it afterwards in Basle. The Germans have 
covered their beloved river with poetry, like a misty 
veil, which adds to its beauty, like a bit of lace over 
the face of a fair woman. Two English prose-poems 
have been laid on its shrine, Longfellow's Hyperion, 
and the Pilgrims of the Rhine, by Bulwer. 

The first is like a bunch of sweet-smelling flowers, 
dewy and fresh, as if the blessing of the morning were 
still on them; but the latter is like the same bunch, 
imitated after the best French method of making arti- 
ficial flowers, lovely perhaps, but scentless and dry. 

It is but an hour's journey from Mayence to Frank- 
fort, the old capital of the German empire. 

The " Hotel de Bruxelle"' treats one perhaps as well 
as one deserves ; but the " Roman Emperor " hath a 
more royal way with him. 

All its old glories are but the setting to Dannecker's 
« Ariadne on the Panther." One enters a small museum 
of classical figures," evidently sculptured before the 
fashion of clothes, or even fig leaves, had ever been 
heard of, a room to make every man and woman look 
10 



146 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

in each other's eyes, as Adam and Eve did when they 
found themselves naked, and were ashamed. 

It is not to be supposed that the traveller pene- 
trates as far as Frankfort without being introduced to 
whole armies of nude statues ; but the nakedness of 
these figures was so aggressive, that they ought to have 
been arrested by a policeman. The *' Ariadne" is by 
herself^ in a little room with scarlet walls, which cast a 
pink glow over her figure. She is naked, too, but she 
is so clothed upon with loveliness, that one no more 
thinks of noticing it than would the happy panther that 
bears her. Ariadne's story is shadowed forth in her 
face. 

She was a king's daughter, who saved the Greek 
Theseus from danger, because she loved him. He per- 
suaded her to elope with him, and perhaps she loved 
him better than the manly heart can bear, for he soon 
wearied of her, and when she lay asleep one day on an 
island, he deserted her. After great despair, she suf- 
fered herself, like a sensible woman, to be comforted 
by the god Bacchus (which does not mean that she 
took to drink), and hence comes the panther, which 
was an animal sacred to Bacchus. 

The sculptor has wrought into her face the expres- 
sion of a woman scorned, and yet triumphant. She 
has but one desire more on earth, and that is to meet 
Theseus and cut him dead. The miniature Ariadnes, 
in parian and plaster, that adorn American mantels, 
are very decent copies of the panther, but the real Ari- 
adne never leaves her rose-tinted home in Frankfort. 

The hall of the Kaisers, lined with full-length por- 
traits of all the German emperors who ever reigned, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION". 147 

was not a comfortable place to visit. One felt that one 
ought to know something of all those high-colored Ot- 
tos and Ludwigs, whom they married, or what famous 
heads they had cut off; but they were all strangers. 
Only the husband and father of Maria Theresa were 
anything like old acquaintances. In the great street 
of Frankfort, called " Zeil," every woman is on her 
native heatli. Her soul may have swelled and budded 
on the Rhine, but amid the ravishing china and dainty 
embroidery that line this street, she is herself again. 
Frankfort is a sort of outpost of Berlin in worsted 
work, and if she wants to buy a drab-colored Moses on 
a sky-blue ground, or a shower of golden butterflies 
just alight on a sofa-pillow, or any other bit of work 
that is "red with the blood of murdered time," now is 
her opportunity. 

Frankfort was the birthplace of Goethe, the " many- 
sided one," who ^aught that virtue was one of the fine 
arts, which one might cultivate or not, as one had time 
or talent. The man who wrote Elective Affinities 
ought to have been stoned to death by his country- 
women. 



148 BEATEN PATHS, OR 




CHAPTER XL 

MOEE GEEMANY. 

"At intervals the wind of the summer night passed through 
the ruined castle and the trees, and they sent forth a sound as if 
Nature were sighing in her dreams ; and then all was still save 
the sweet, passionate song of the nightingales, that nowhere sing 
more sweetly than in the gardens of Heidelberg Castle." — Long- 
fellow. 

E reached Heidelberg on the eve of the birth- 
day of its aged university, and the town buzzed 
with young people come to celebrate it, like a hive of 
bees about to swarm. 

The ruined castle, which broods over the town like 
an anxious mother over her baby's crib, burst into a 
blaze of red light at ten o'clock, which showed every 
little scroll and leafy capital on its carved front. It 
renewed its princely and brilliant youth, like a gray old 
actress suddenly inspired by a memory of early triumph, 
and then it sank into quick darkness and old age, and 
all the people, gathered on the river in crowds to see 
the glory of a moment, went home to drink to the 
health of the university. 

The castle loses nothing when one climbs to it by 
daylight. The view from the battlements is a rest to 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 149 

the weary, and the hill-side is threaded all over with 
shady paths, ending in dark little nooks, where an army 
of lovers might wander all night and never hear of 
each other. 

This palace of a castle was six centuries in building, 
and for some years it was the home of Elizabeth, the 
ill-fated Queen of Bohemia, who sacrificed everything 
for the empty title of queen, and came to utter poverty 
in her old age. She was grand-daughter of Mary 
Queen of Scots, and, like most of the Stuarts, early 
found herself on the wrong side of fate. The noble 
ladies who were borne into this castle must have spent 
their summer days on the esplanade, embroidering ban- 
ners for brothers and lovers, and seeing every Sir Laun- 
celot that rode up the river bank below them ; if they 
were crossed in love, they had only to leap off the bat- 
tlements in the small hours of the night, with the cer- 
tainty of having their names embalmed forever in 
German song and story. With all these materials for 
happiness, what could a woman ask more? 

The walls of the castle are, in many places, twenty 
feet thick: Time would have grown old and lost his 
teeth before he could have gnawed them away, if he 
had not been assisted by French gunpowder. 

A guide is ready for you and your fee, and leads you 
through a dusty labyrinth of old rooms and passages, 
while you wish yourself under the trees of the hill-side; 
he finishes with the " Great Tun," which held three hun- 
dred thousand bottles of wine. The journey through 
the castle is a snare and a delusion, and one can see 
the Great Tun at any time with a common hogshead 
and a magnifying glass. 



150 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

The famous university is a very insignificant cluster 
of buildings, as one looks clown at it from the ''Phi- 
losopher's Walk," a long avenue planted with vine- 
yards, on the opposite side of the river ; at the foot of 
it is an inn and a court-yard where the students fight 
their duels, and mar the little beauty given them by 
nature. Duelling began in the reign of Henry II. of 
France, who asked his courtiers, impatiently, "Why 
do you come to me for justice when you wear that at 
your side with which you can do yourselves justice ? " 
whereupon the first challenge w^as sent. Perhaps a 
Heidelberg student will send the last. The wrongs of 
all dogs in other German cities are here made up to a 
few; many of the students lead about very handsome 
ones, and it is said that after a drinking bout, the dogs 
often lea,d their masters, being the nobler animal of 
the two. The university was born in the fourteenth 
century, and even in its babyhood had half a thousand 
students, learning by heart versified rules of grammar, 
and endless commentaries, darkening wisdom that was 
dark enough in the beginning. "Truly, I do not won- 
der," says Longfellow, " that the pupils of Erigena Sco- 
tus put him to death with their penknives. They must 
have been driven to thQ very verge of despair." There 
is a large colony of young Americans at Heidelberg, 
and it is a vexed question there, as everywhere else, 
whether women shall be admitted to the benefits of 
the university. 

One young lady from Boston has just gone through 
a course of ethics and philosophy, the only woman 
among two hundred and fifty young men; her thirty 
years and her high aim (she destines herself for the 



A WOMAN'S vacation: 151 

practice of law) brought her unscathed through the 
ordeal. 

Musical instruction is excellent and cheap, and good 
board may be found for five francs (a dollar) a day; 
but it is a place full of sorrows for a girl, who has no 
friends to receive and make a background for her. 
She may come from America, full of hope and courage, 
with her heart set solely on a good musical education, 
but the weight of German opinion will slowly and 
surely bear down her good cheer. She has to breathe 
air thick with suspicion,, and in every German girl's 
eyes, she reads the pharisaic rejoicing that they are not 
as she is. 

She may keep up her spirits for a while with a hearty 
scorn of their prudery, but in the end, if she cares for 
society, she must yield to its limitations. One young 
American girl got on very well by always wearing a 
wedding ring, and behaving as if she had lost every 
friend she had in the world. 

A lonely girl cannot be happy without being im- 
proper, at least in the eyes of female Heidelbergers ; 
and I suppose men here, as at home, must think as 
their wives do. Women have a silent legislation in 
the realm of propriety none the less binding that it is 
not found in statute-books. 

In the slight glimpses that the traveller catches of 
German family-life in the lower and middle classes, 
which is, of course, the majority, the wife is no better 
than his dog, nor nearer than his horse, to her husband. 
He comes home to eat and to sleep, speaking none but 
necessary words to his wife, who hastens to fill him up 
with his favorite dishes. 



152 BEATEN PATHS, OR ■ 

To a guest or a boarder he may address a sentence 
or two of courtesy, but never to his wife, and then he 
hurries away (if a German ever hurries) to a beer-gar- 
den to spend his evenings. He seems to suspect some- 
thing effeminate in an American, who prefers to sit 
down with his wife and children at home. 

A German woman's motto seems to have been writ- 
ten for her long ago by old Chaucer : — 

" She saith not once ' nay,' when he saith ' yea ; ' 
* Do this/ saith he ; ' All ready, sir,' quoth she.'* 

I say that this is the outward appearance of German 
family-life; but no one can liave studied womanly char- 
acter anywhere without discovering that total submis- 
sion would soon exterminate the sex. Famine and 
pestilence would not be so sure. To have her own 
way is to a woman the breath of life; and it must be 
confessed that German women do not look so miserable 
as they ought. I doubt not they have found a way to 
lead their husbands without letting them see the string; 
and if one had time to study their back-stairs politics, 
they might not be found to differ very widely from 
those of America. 

Two hours' travel through a fertile country and 
home-like villages lies between Heidelberg, the place of 
study, and Baden-Baden, the place of pleasure. 

The whole air of Baden isfull of rest and leisure, as 
if no one who came there brought any shadow of work 
or business with him. Once it was the scene of a 
perpetual tragedy, in which men and women threw 
away their money, and their happiness, openly and 
without shame. Lookers-on held their breath as they 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 153 

would at the racing of bloorl-horses. Since the gam- 
bling-houses have been suppressed, Baden has lost its 
morbid charm. It is as if Lord Byron, in the heiglit 
of his profligacy, had "experienced religion;" he 
would still be noble, handsome, and poetic, but not 
half so interesting. 

The Conversation-house and gardens are light as day 
every evening, and elegantly-dressed crowds walk up 
and down, looking at one another, and eating ices 
under the trees, while the air palpitates to the music 
of the Strauss waltzes. People only kill time in Baden 
now, not their own souls. The place is lovely as ever, 
a gem of price set in a circle still more precious in the 
shape of environs ; but nothing in natural scenery can 
be so fascinating to men and women as the exhibition 
of their own passions, 

A young Dutch lady travelling with us, for the first 
time out of her own flat country, could not find words 
strong enough, in her scanty English, to convince us of 
its deliciousness. "Heidelberg was good," she said, 
with a final eflbrt; "I loved the hill and its castle; but 
Baden, O, Baden, I said, I will never leave it!" 

Next to Naples, Baden is most addicted to carved 
coral. It is dear, as are all beautiful things every- 
where outside of heaven, but not so dear as in America. 

From Baden we went round a cornerto Strasbourg, 
which has lately dropped out of French into German 
hands ; but like a slave sold late in life, it is too old to 
change its character or habits. There is an air of 
solidity and time-worn custom about it, as if it had 
stood from the beginning of the world. Even the 
Romans found it a goodly town, and added nothing 



154 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

but fortifications. The cathedral tower is so hisch and 
light, it might be the only pinnacle left of the tower 
built by the giants to scale heaven. In the first French 
revolution, this great height was considered to insult 
the principle of equality, and was only saved from 
destruction by the Strasbourgers hastening to put the 
red cap of liberty on it. That red cap, made of tin, is 
now preserved in the city, a monument of French 
idiocy. 

The cathedral-front is dainty as a bit of point-lace ; 
it was brought to perfection by three generations of 
Steinbachs, chief among whom is remembered Sabina 
Yon Steinbach, one of the few women who have ap- 
prenticed themselves to the trade of architecture, which 
Madame de Stael calls " frozen music." In the interior, 
one pillar, called the '■ Pillar of the Angels," is espe- 
cially hers, and one of a group of Apostles holds a 
scroll with these words on it in Latin : — 

"May the grace of God fall to thy share, Sabina, 
Whose hands have formed my image out of this hard stone." 

Some of the grace of man also fell to her share, for 
Avhen she went to the cathedral to see this group ar- 
ranged, the archbishop came to meet her, and placed a 
laurel wreath on her head. 

There is in many of the sculptures and ornaments of 
the Strasbourg Cathedral, a varying richness and deli- 
cacy that I have not seen in any other; like the over- 
flowing of a pure woman's thoughts. The famous 
clock in one corner draws a greater crowd than all the 
carved memories of Sabina. It calculates almost every- 
thing but the end of the world. Near the top is a fig- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 155 

ure of Time with a scythe : at the first quarter of the 
hour, the figure of a child passes before him ; at the 
second, a youth ; at the third, a man of middle age ; and 
on the hour, a graybeard bowed with age. Above is a 
figure of Christ, and at noon the twelve apostles walk 
around him, each one turning and bowing as he passes. 
These figures are all about a foot high ; and to close the 
puppet-show, a cock of life-size crows hoarsely three 
times. The clock calculates the times of ecclesiastical 
festivals, many of which are movable. This part of the 
machine is said to require a thousand wheels, and at the 
beginning of the new year they all turn round and 
arransje themselves for a new start. 

The town is rich in high-peaked houses of Spanish 
memory, favorite haunts of the sacred bird, the stork, 
which struts about the streets and makes nests on the 
chimneys as if it were the real landlord of the town, 
and the inhabitants mere tenants at will. They have 
names, like children of the family; and it is looked on 
as an unfailing sign of coming misfortune when the 
storks desert a house where they have long lived, and 
make a nest on another chimney. When Yan Arte- 
velde takes on him the dangerous headship of the 
rebellious citizens of Ghent, Clara, his sister, dissuades 
him with this potent argument : — 

"Roger was esteemed 
The wisest stork in Ghent, and flew away 
But twice before ; ^— the first time in the night 
Before my father took that office up 
Which proved so fatal in the end, and then, 
The second time, the niglit before lie died." 



156 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Strasbourg is the headquarters of that epicurean dish 
"Pates de foie gras," made from the livers of geese that 
are fattened in a hot place. Who would be a goose in 
Strasbourg? 

The women of Alsace, of which this old city is the 
capital, wear for head-gear an enormous black ribbon 
bow, which flares out from the back of the head like 
wings. It is inexpressibly odd in its effect, yet not un- 
graceful, if it make a dark background to a pretty face. 

In front of the cathedral I think we met very nearly, 
if not quite, its youngest citizen — a choleric-looking 
baby submerged, all but its head, in a padded and 
ruffled calico bag. The nurse tried to convey to us its 
age in broken French and crumbly German, and some 
of us, who knew more of languages than of babies, 
thought she said "ten days;" but I am persuaded she 
meant ten hours, and that it is one of the time-honored 
customs of the city to show the cathedral to its babies, 
or the babies to the cathedral, on the very first day of 
their arrival in Strasbourg. 

As we turned our faces towards Basle and the Alps, 
we had frequent reason to hope that old father Oiigen's 
doctrine is a true one, namely, that at the judgment 
day all women are changed into men. There must be 
a warm sympathy between the women of this region 
and the other lower animals, where a woman and a 
cow are sometimes harnessed together to draw the 
plough, and a donkey cannot drag his load up hill with- 
out a woman to pull with him. 

*' 1 am a woman, woe is me ! 
Born to grief and irksome care." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 157 

Later we saw a woman and a donkey drawing a cart 
along a stony road, with a man in the cart fast asleep ; 
and when she passed a steep place with a pile of stones 
at the bottom, her spirit had been so dulled by long 
oppression that she passed it by, and never perceived 
her opportunity to tip out her lord and master, and 
pretend it was an accident. She was more stupid than 
the donkey. 

Near Brussels two women were spreading a load of 
manure on a field, barefooted and bareheaded in the 
blazing sun, — 

*' "Women they, 
Or what had been those gracious things." 

"We never see -such a thing in America. It is a 
happy place for women," we said to our stolid old 
coachman, for want of any other foreign audience to 
hear our little brag. 

"And unhappy for men?" was his instant question, 
as if one implied the other. 

"I don't know; I never asked them," I said, with a 
sudden doubt; but Juno scorned my uncertainty. 

"You have no need to ask them; wherever women 
are happy, men are in Paradise!" She said it in Eng- 
lish, but that old coachman shrugged his shoulders all 
the same. Later in the day we took up this stitch 
where we had dropped it. 

" It only looks barbarous to us because it is unfa- 
miliar," said St. Ursula, who would find excuses for a 
cannibal. " Perhaps these peasant women have a hap- 
piness of their own, and would not change with us. 
They have never known anything better, and don't 



158 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

mind it. I have seen refined and delicate women in 
America drudging all day over a hot cooking-stove, 
when it would have been better for their souls and 
bodies to work in the fields with their husbands." 

"I cannot think so," I said, rushing to take up St. 
Ursula's gauntlet. "A woman's temple is in her home; 
anything that takes her out of it makes that temple 
desolate just so long as she stays away. A house with- 
out a mistress in it, is a body without a soul. When 
she voluntarily leaves it to lecture, or to preach, or to 
till the ground, or to do anything that lays bare her 
sacred seclusion, and places her on the same level with 
men, she stoops to do work lower than that which is 
divinely appointed to her to do in her own sphere. 
She may do it better than men ; but it is degradation, 
nevertheless. She sells her birthright for a mess of 
I3ottage, that nourishes neither herself nor anybody 
else. A refined and delicate woman hanging over a 
cooking-stove does not move me to pity as would the 
same woman (supposing that one refined and delicate 
ever did such a thing) if she cut ofi" her long-hair, her 
glory, dressed herself in two shades of light silk, with 
train, and over-dress, and ruffles, and gold ornaments, 
and round tires like the moon, and went up on a plat- 
form to work herself into a white heat of indignation 
because women are not permitted to vote. One may 
boil and bake all day, and not be so hot and panting as 
I have seen a famous woman-lecturer, after an hour's 
vigorous scolding at the oppressive man of straw who 
will not give women the suffrage. To the best of my 
belief, women have voted from the beginning of the 
world. Nothing good, bad, or indifferent ever hap- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 159 

pened that they had not a hand in it. And of all the 
sex, for an American woman to disturb herself about 
her rights, is like an old lady searching for her spec- 
tacles when they are on her nose all the time." 

■*'I have no desire to lecture," said St. Ursula, "nor 
to wear 'two shades of light silk;' but I still think that 
an immense amount of womanly eloquence, and poetry 
and. power has gone up the kitchen chimney in our 
happy country." 

" It may be so ; but it might have been equally wasted 
on a platform. I knew a woman — 'we ne'er shall look 
upon her like again ' — who did the drudging work of 
a farmer's wife, in a low-roofed cottage, all her life, and 
brought up ten children to be noble and worthy men 
and women, always standing ready, and keeping their 
powder dry, to serve their country when it needed 
them. She lived to see three of her sons in Congress 
at the same time; to see them governors, and generals, 
and ambassadors, healing foreign as well as home 
wounds, and all of them rose up and called her blessed. 

" She never had a more intimate friend than her fire- 
place; she was forced to stick to it closer than a brother 
for a score of years, in order to fill her children's mouths; 
but when she could find no other moment in which to 
keep up with the history of her country, she would 
have one of the boys read to her, at the breakflist table, 
the speeches made by Webster, and Clay, and Calhoun, 
who were then in their glory. 

"In her triumphant old age, she was like the mother 
of kings. When she asked me if I liad read the last 
speech of this son or that son, I felt that she was show- 
ing me the crown jewels. She seldom stirred fifty feet 



160 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

from her kitchen, and yet she made herself a power in 
the earth. . If she had lived in cities, and held a weekly 
reception of the most gifted people in the land, or had 
crowded all her heart and brain into a book of poems 
or a novel, which should touch the soul of the whole 
nation, she might have had more of the semblance of 
fame, but not a tithe of its substance that came to her 
as she sent forth one after another of her worthy 
workers in her Lord's vineyard." 

"You forget," said St. Ursula, "that neither kitchens 
nor children enter into the lot of some women, to be 
made glorious, if they are ever so willing and able. 
You forget the old maids." 

"Never! May my right hand forget its cunning 
when I forget them. They are the bone and sinew, 
the reserve guard of the country ; but I maintain that 
no woman has a right to be an old maid." 

" She may have no choice." 

"I deny it. Every woman has the choice at least 
once in her life. Take our own party, and try the 
argumentum ad foeminam (if there is such a thing). 
We are, at this present, ten women of all ages, from 
seventeen to fifty, matrons and maidens; but might we 
not all have married at some time in our lives, if we 
would ? " A conscious smile mounted into twenty eyes 
and a little flush of color brightened some cheeks, as 
my foolish words brought up some sad, or sweet, or 
triumphant memory out of the dead past. 

"Of all women's rights, you would say," said St. 
Ursula, "the only one really worth fighting for, is the 
riofht to love and to be loved?" 

" And to refuse love," suggested Juno. "The poorest 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 161 

and forlornest of women have that right; not St. Paul 
nor the legislature can take it from them. I suppose 
it is this, with a generous allowance of beer and cab- 
bage, which keeps the German women in such good 
condition." 

11 



162 BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER XII. 



SWITZERLAND. 




" What pleasure lives in height — 
In height and cold, the splendor of the hills ? " 

T Basle, tlie hotel of "The Three Kings" swal- 
lowed us bodily, and never thought of us again. 
It is a caravanserai, very gorgeous in its appointments, 
fit to entertain "Caspar, Melchior, and Baltasar" them- 
selves; but any visitor of lower rank than a king must 
fight valiantly to secure any attention at all. It was 
here, too, that we put our collective foot down on the 
"candle fraud." At every continental hotel, each vis- 
itor is charged for a whole candle, even if he stay but 
oiie night, and does not light it at all. If four people 
use one room, they pay for four candles, and the ser- 
vant rushes ahead of you to light them all, with an 
enthusiasm worthy of a better cause. Next day the 
candles are ingeniously whittled down to represent 
new ones to the next comer. At Basle we made a 
mild protest against paying for seven candles, none of 
which had been lighted, for fear of mosquitos. 

If the clerk had been born and bred in an American 
hotel, he could not have crushed us more superciliously 
with his, "You had the chance to light them; you 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 163 

must pay for that." We did pay for it (they are not 
afraid of women's wrath in that country), and solemn- 
ly rolled up our seven candles in the heart of our bag- 
gage, and went forth from his house like a tallow- 
chandler with six apprentices. 

We did not find Basle wonderful in any way, except 
that an evening on the balcony overhanging the Rhine 
will probably remain in the memory, when many statues 
and pictures have wiped each other out. The river is 
swift, and careless, and relentless as Fate. Men have 
put a "thus far, and no farther," to it with stone edges,- 
and thrown out a balcony here and there, from which 
to watch it go by, and that is about all meri can do 
with their Fate. 

It was here in the darkness that I heard a loud voice 
say, "What do I care for these little spouting Swiss 
waterfalls, when I have seen ISTiagara?" as who should 
say, "Why do I c^are to look at any other woman, 
when mine eyes have beheld Barnum's fat lady, who 
weighs six hundred pounds?" More than one on the 
balcony groaned inwardly, "O my country, may you 
not be judged by your travelling children ! " 

On the way from Basle to Lucerne, the sweet breath 
of the mountains begins to cool the air, and snow caps 
appear in the distance, with the Jungfrau in the midst, 
like a noble lady ministered to by her hand-maidens. 

We pass the lake and battle-field of Sempach, where 
the Swiss conquered their old enemies, the Austrians, 
by the example of one hero. 

The foe had adopted a new military tactic of fight- 
ing in a square with pikes outward, and believed them- 
selves impenetrable; but Arnold von Winckelreid, a 



164 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

man of immense strength, saw his opportunity as they 
advanced, and calling out to his followers, " Country- 
men, remember my wife and childi-en," gathered his 
arms full of pikes into his own breast, and so broke 
the square. The Swiss struck into the breach so made, 
and routed the Austrians. 

*'This patriot's self-devoted deed 

First tamed the lion's mood, i 

And the four forest cantons freed 
Prom thraldom by his blood." 

Many poems have been built out of it, but no one 
seems to know whether the "women-folks" of this 
hero were properly remembered or not by his country- 
men. I cannot imagine a more uncomfortable position 
for a woman than to be the wife of a real working 
hero or philanthropist. She is sure to be offered up as 
a sacrifice on one altar or another. 

Heroism used to be its own reward ; but since the 
age of scepticism has set in, and learning has been 
stalking about Switzerland to prove that no such man 
as William Tell ever existed, it is pretty certain that 
Arnold von Winckelreid's days of fame are numbered. 

A bright, green river, like a melted emerald, comes 
rushing out of Lucerne to meet the traveller. This 
river Reuss springs out of the green lake that lies lov- 
ingly about the feet of Lucerne, and pillows on its 
breast the mountain shadows. 

The town is perfect for situation ; mountain and lake 
can no farther go! It is like turning over an illus- 
trated book, in which the pictures are far better than 
the text, and even the railway station, with its carved 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 165 

gables, serves for a frontispiece. There are plenty of 
views in Switzerland more grand and solemn, but Lu- 
cerne has just enough beauty for human nature's daily 
food. It keeps one cheerful without the wear and tear 
of enthusiasm. 

In its quaint old church is a famous organ, played in 
the twilight of every day. It ended with a storm- 
piece beginning in distant rumbling and pouring rain, 
which made every one instinctively glance up at the 
windows ; then came a mighty rushing wind and thun- 
der, so sharp and rattling that the lightning seemed to 
strike the seat in front of us ; there was water running 
down the roofs and in the streets, and birds chirping 
out of wet branches, and long blasts of the Alpine 
horn, with half a dozen echoes more and more distant. 
At last the rain grew lighter and softer, and the sun 
came out with a great burst of shine, and the whole 
earth was glad of the rain. People turned pale and 
red, and some young girls cried from excitement. It 
was a great surprise to go outside and find dust blow- 
ing in the streets, as if nothing had happened. 

All around the church is a curious covered cemetery, 
ornamented with pictures, and statues, and artificial 
flowers. The lowest line on every tombstone was 
"R. I. P.," which sounded better when we bethought 
us to magnify it into " Requiescat in Pace." 

Every one goes to see the "Lion of Lucerne," carved 
out of the stone face of an everlasting hill, in memory 
of the Swiss guards who defended the Tuileries in the 
first insanity of France. Louis XVI. and Marie An- 
toinette had fled to the Assembly for safety, and these 
Swiss guards died, man by man, to the number of five 



166 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

hundred and sixty men and twenty-six officers at the 
hands of the mob. The lion, designed by Thorwaldsen, 
lies in a niche in the wall of rock, over a pool of still 
water, and shaded darkly by trees. His face has more 
nobility than that of most men, and he clasps in death 
a shield bearing the lilies of France. Lucerne is a 
walled town, with watch-towers, and has some queer 
old -painted bridges, which ought to be looked at in 
the brightest part of the day. 

In one of them is the "Dance of Death," which 
makes one scene in Longfellow's Golden Legend. 

Elsie. — " What are these paintings on the walls around us ? " 
Prince Henry, — " The Dance of Death : 

All that go to and fro must look upon it, 

Mindful of what thej shall be. 

The grim musician 

Leads all men through the mazes of that dance. 

To different sounds in different measures moving;. 

Sometimes he plays a lute, sometimes a drum, 

To tempt or terrify." 

The ascent of Mount Rhigi, one of the easiest of all 
the Swiss mountains, is made from Lucerne between 
eight in the morning and six at night ; but the favorite 
visit is for the night, for which a telegram must be 
sent up in advance, on account of the rush of people. 
There is no certainty, however, of seeing either sunset 
or sunrise, and the journey is often made wholly in 
cloudland. On a clear day, one counts a dozen lakes 
from the summit, and the passion which most people 
have to be taken into a high mountain, and shown all 
the kingdoms of the earth, is gratified. The railway 
is like all others, except for a broad central rail with 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 167 

teeth, in which a cogged wheel under the engine turns. 
The passenger car is always in front, and may be 
stopped almost instantly. Timid people go up on 
horseback, and the absolute cowards on foot. 

Mount Pilatus is another favorite of aspiring souls 
near Lucerne. It signifies "capped mountain;" and 
when the cap of fog stays on through the morning, 
it means fine weather. People use it for a barometer. 

" Overhead, 
Shaking his cloudy tresses loose in air, 
Rises Pilatus, with his windy pines." 

There is a legend that Pontius Pilate was banished 
to this mountain, and, driven by remorse, threw him- 
self over one of its cliffs. It is imcertain whether he 
suggested the name, or the name suggested him. The 
Swiss mountains have been trimmed and made over 
as much as possible ; but there is plenty of material 
afforded in these days for new and tragical legends. 

While we tarried at Lucerne, a young Englishman 
went up Mount Pilatus to look for rare ferns and 
Alpine flowers. Not coming back at night, his father 
and mother took it for granted that he had gone on by 
boat to Interlachen, and when they arrived there, they 
learned that his broken body had been found at the 
foot of a precipice. 

The fashion of offering up human sacrifices will 
never die out while people ascend mountains just for 
the sake of saying they have been there. 

It is noticeable that the climbing passion is pecu- 
liar to long and lean persons having a hungry look 
like Cassius. Plump, round, easy-going souls are con- 



168 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

tent to sit at the feet of Nature, without scaling her 
heights. 

The cream of all the day's journeys that may be 
made from Lucerne is the sail on the lake to Fluelen 
and "Tell's Chapel." It is said to be built on the spot 
where Tell leaped ashore and shot Gessler. It was 
consecrated only thirty years after his death, in the 
presence of more than a hundred people who had 
known him in the body, which would seem a sufficient 
answer to the doubts which have been thrown on the 
existence of any such man as William Tell. Mr. 
Baring-Gould, in a book called Myths of the Middle 
Ages, has tried to undermine the truth of Tell's story, 
on the strength of having found half a dozen similar 
legends in the literature of Persia and Norway, D'en- 
mark and Iceland. 

Tell did a most heroic thing; but others have done 
the same thing in a similar way ; therefore no such per- 
son as Tell ever existed, except in poetry. Women 
are said to be incapable of a syllogism, and I rejoice 
that no woman was guilty of this one. It seems to 
me a thing to be desired that men should shoot apples 
off their sons' heads in a noble cause through all the 
ages, if heroism happens to take that form. The 
authors, who try to blot out of history its most in- 
spiring passages, are worse than the old image-breakers 
who knocked off the noses of statues in the Catholic 
churches. They thought they were doing God service ; 
but Mr. Baring-Gould's book served neither God nor 
man. 

The Golden Age of any literature has been long 
dead and buried before the age of criticism sets in. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 169 

"Do you know who are the critics?" says Mr. Dis- 
raeli in Lothair. "They are those who have failed 
in literature and art." Of all Mr. Disraeli's arrows, 
— and he hath his quiver full of them, — perhaps not 
one has a sharper point than this. 

All the mountain-guardians of Lucerne had their 
caps on, when we crossed the lake at seven in the 
morning to Alpnach and took carriages for the Brunig 
Pass. There is a flavor in mountain air, that goes to 
one's head like new wine. 

*' We were gay together, 
And laughed at little jests. " 

for an unsuspicious hour or two, rolling through the 
most beautiful scenery in the world. Long tradition, if 
not experience, might have taught us that it was too 
good to last. Too much comfort is not consistent with 
this world's scheme of government. The old monks 
might have known better than to wear hair shirts and 
flagellate themselves through the night hours. That 
sort of thing will always be done for us in the course 
of nature if we wait long enough. Happiness is not 
found in nuggets ; it has to be dug out of life with labor 
and pains. Our caravan of twelve carriages came to a 
sudden stop without any visible cause, and an English- 
man came to our door, announcing, in the unmoved way 
common to his nation, that the mountain torrents had 
washed away the road, and made it impassable for car- 
riages for five or six miles. He bad no doubt that such 
a difficulty would be at once overcome in his country, 
because every one would make an effort ; but "these peo- 
ple" (the Swiss) never made efforts. Bags and valises 



170 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

might be carried over on men's shoulders, but trunks 
must be left behind. Ah ! then and there were partings 
to wring one's heart, for women can be divorced from 
anything more easily than from their clothes. 

They retired into dark corners with their baggage, 
bending over it long and lovingly, and coming back 
with large bundles done up in newspapers and shawl- 
straps. Some of our party had mourned for their 
trunks (which had been left in London) as for the 
flesh-pots of Egypt; but we were all converted into 
carpet-baggers from this time forth. There was an 
Italian duke in the party, with a train of servants 
and a daughter lovely enough for another Juliet; but 
mountain torrents are no respecters of persons. 

The Englishwomen, in the company of fifty that 
straggled over the mountain on that brilliant morning, 
girded up their loins, and got over the ground as if 
they had done the same thing every day of their lives ; 
but "les Americaines" puffed, and panted, and turned 
white, and did the last mile or two on their minds 
rather than on their feet. 

One old couple (English, of course), sixty-five and 
seventy years old, led the van, and scorning to take the 
diligences when they came to meet us, walked on ten 
miles more to Brienz; and when we joined them on the 
boat at that place, the old lady looked as fair and 
unflushed as when she started. At home we should 
put such a feat in the newspaper, and no one would 
believe a word of it. 

For two mortal hours, we weaker vessels struggled 
over long stretches of loose stones, and yellow mud, 
and rushing water, with no soul left in us to admire the 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 171 

waterfalls that festooned the gray mountain walls like 
white ribbons. To us, they were not bridal favors, but 
so many taunts and jeers at our forlorn condition. 
Some one remembered a cheerful story of a young 
man and his sister walking over a Swiss road, torn 
up like this one, and the brother, turning his foot- on 
a loose stone, slipped, and fell over *the edge, going 
down hundreds of feet in the current of the fall. An- 
other added that this young man had all the money of 
the family in his pocket, so that his sister was left pen- 
niless. Still another had later news of the sister, Avhose 
grief did so scatter her wits, that she threw herself 
over the next precipice. Thus did we cheer our souls 
with anecdote along the rugged way. 

Two or three people came back in their tracks, and 
reported that it was impossible to go on ; we must cer- 
tainly turn back and spend Sunday at Lucerne. When 
we declined their advice with thanks, and pushed on, 
they wished us "bon voyage" with ,a mingling of sor- 
row and contempt, which made us renew our strength 
like eagles. One can do anything, upheld by a contrary 
mind. 

At Lagnau we were, fed and comforted with eight or 
ten courses of Swiss cookery, and the American wrecks 
were packed into other diligences for the last ten miles. 
The Brunig Pass is full of beauty, pressed down and 
running over; but our admiration was, for that day at 
least, tempered with awe. The way winds and winds 
like a spiral staircase, and comes out many times in view 
of the same waterfall. It creeps under an overhanging 
rock which "baptizes by sprinkling" every one who 
passed under it. This water comes from hidden springs, 



172 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

which must some time slice off this rock as with a 
knife ; and when it falls, the end of the world will come 
for those who now live placidly at its feet in the valley. 

A muddy stream rushes angrily through the ravine, 
as if it resented the stone walls that keep it so narrow, 
when it might flood a dozen villages as well as not. 
The lake shore, when we take steamer again for Inter- 
laken, is studded with villas and carved cottages, and 
the Geissbach Fall makes a final plunge into the lake, 
after all its amorous dalliance with the mountain-side. 
The cottages all over Switzerland wear their roofs far 
over the walls, like broad-brimmed hats ; and under this 
shelter it is common to write texts and bits of poetry 
in large letters, that he who runs may read. On one 
near Geissbach is the line, in German, "D^r friend, 
love more and see clearer in every man a brother." 

Interlaken lies between the lakes, as its name implies, 
but it should be called a village of hotels. A circle of 
steep wooded hills stands all around it, like sentinels, 
not grimly, but as if it were a favorite prisoner. A 
green river clasps it like an arm about its waist. Be- 
tween two low mountains, the Jungfrau looks down on 
the village like a maiden just risen from sleep, parting 
her curtains to look over the hills and far away for her 
lover. Interlaken is always crowded in the season; 
but there is little to see there, except the people and 
the Jungfrau. 

All nations meet together in peace, as it will be in 
the millennium, ''Jew and Gentile, bond and fi-ee," not 
to mention dusky Creoles from the isles of the sea, and 
bushy Russians, whoge names are best pronounced by 
a sneeze. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 173 

Its great charm lies in its restfulness. When the 
grasshopper is a burden, the only remedy is to sit down 
in a still place and wait for hope and interest to spring 
np again. Multitudes find this still place at Inter- 
laken, and use it to repair damages in soul and body. 

Large parties are happiest in foreign hotels, because 
they need not die of silence; but solitary travellers 
wander about like lost spirits on the Stygian shore, 
looking importunate, but speaking to no one. 

American girls are pretty and plenty at Interlaken. 
Their distinguishing mark in '73 lay in the tower of 
braids which made each one a " turret-crowned Cybele." 
It may be only patriotism which leads every American 
to rejoice in the superior beauty of his countrywomen 
abroad. Foreigners think so too, if a prolonged and 
exhaustive scrutiny be any proof. Staring among for- 
eign gentlemen is cultivated as a fine art. They look 
at a pretty American girl as Adam must have looked 
at Eve, when he woke from his long sleep and met her 
eyes for the firsts time. The gaze is at first curious, as 
of one who had never seen a woman before, and melts 
at last into an intense satisfaction. A young girl w^ho 
has endured a season in a foreign hotel, going to table 
d'hote every day, is safe to run any gantlet of eyes 
that will ever be bent on her at home. The old 
maxim, that " it takes two to make a stare," does not 
hold good in Europe. 

There is no class on foreign soil that corresponds to 
American girls. At home they have their own way, 
and it makes even the plain ones piquant and stylish, 
full of gay talk and laughter. There is no other recipe 
so certain to develop a woman's beauty. It is the 



174 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

you^ng mfirried women and mothers in America who 
are subdued, reserved, and cumbered with much serv- 
ing; but in Europe, the two positions are exactly 
reversed. " If my lot were to be cast in this latitude," 
said Juno at last, "I should pray to be born married." 
A cultivated Frenchman, after long observation of New 
York life, declared that he could not see why Amer- 
ican girls should desire to marry, for they had under 
their fathers' roof all that a French husband looks on 
as material wherewith to secure a wife's love and hap- 
piness, namely, jewels, freedom, and importance. He 
had not perceived that the love of change will out- 
weigh all these. Even when there is no love worth 
mentioning, an American girl goes into marriage to 
seek her fortune with the same zest and interest with 
which a young man seeks his in a new country. 

A young Spanish architect, who had studied life and 
books in Germany, France, and America, asked us if 
there was any law in our country, as there is in Ger- 
many, compelling a wife to go with her husband into a 
new country, whether she wished to go or not. We 
had never heard of such a law, or conceived the need 
of one, because a wife would naturally desire to go 
with her husband. " Certainement," said the Spaniard, 
"unless she liked some other man." "For married 
women in America," we answered with scorn, " there 
is no ' other man? " He answered me only with a 
shrug of his shoulders; and this is how foreigners 
always have the last word. They seem to believe 
that the price of a virtuous woman is so far above 
rubies, that there are none in the market. 

I cannot help thinking that the beauty of German 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 175 

girls is undermined by the perpetual drinking of beer 
and the sour Rhenish wine. Venus de Medici would 
succumb to it at last, and grow fat and sallow. The 
wife of old Richard Baxter said she did not find him 
so sour as she expected ; but nobody ever said that of 
"vin ordinaire," which takes the place of our beloved 
ice-water. There are institutions in Germany called 
" Wine-Cures," where the patients are fed entirely on 
these sour wines. They must be salutary, since one 
would hasten to get well or die, to escape the torture. 
So many Americans have come, and seen, and been 
conquered in Swiss hotels, that there has come to be a 
certain home-likeness about them. Only the waxed 
floors, and stone staircases, and perhaps a fuchsia stick- 
ing up in the butter, make a little rim of strangeness 
in the most familiar things. The waiting-maids wear 
the picturesque costume of their nation in the hotels, 
because travellers demand it of them ; but their Sun- 
day gowns are made after French fashions. There 
will never be anything prettier than the bright plaid 
skirt and velvet jacket, looped with silver chains, and 
opening on a snowy bodice ; but it will soon have dis- 
appeared from the face of the earth. Swiss women 
would rather look like other people than to be odd 
and pretty. Many of them have a rich color in their 
cheeks, like the sunny side of a peach, which is going 
out of fashion in other countries. 

The people of the mountain villages are lank and 
tall, with high cheek-bones and narrow foreheads, as if 
they had stretched themselves with continual climbing. 
They are set among their fine scenery like groups of 
exclamation points. 



176 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

I forgot the sunset on the Jungfrau, when I said 
there was nothing to see in Interlaken. The " young 
maiden " does not blush every night ; she has to be 
watched and waited for; but when the air is peculiarly 
clear and dry, the snow-peaks turn rose-pink under the 
last glance of the sinking sun, just as some pale faces 
put on a mask of beauty with a sudden blush. 

One evening we went on the lake with the crowd 
to Geissbach, to see the fall illuminated with colored 
lights, which is a good deal like painting the lily, and 
gilding refined gold. 

The walk is severe up the side of the mountain to a 
point near the hotel, where the water- takes a long 
tumble down stairs, several flights of which are visible 
at once. Airy little bridges are thrown over them, and 
the most romantic walks wind about them. 

Switzerland would be the loveliest place for lovers 
if so many had not already found it out. You can 
scarcely find a shady place in the whole country where 
you will not interrupt some conscious couple in their 
love-making. My window in the hotel commanded a 
little rustic seat, otherwise hidden from view, and it 
comforted my soul to count the young men and maid- 
ens that found their way to it in the course of a long 
summer day. It proved that love was not gone out 
of fashion, as I have sometimes feared. 

Hundreds of people had gathered on the Geissbach 
terivace, just to see the water run green and red for one 
little minute over the rocks. It was beautiful beyond 
words while it lasted, and yet it was taking an im- 
pertinent liberty with the real moon-lit romance of 
the scene, and painfully suggested the " Black Crook." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 177 

The long waiting and breathless attention of so many 
idle people reminded me of a fashionable wedding, 
brought to pass by months of hard labor, which, after 
all, lasts about as long as this Geissbach show. When 
the sudden light turned night into day on the crowded 
terrace, an army of braided heads rose up from broad- 
cloth shoulders as if pulled by one wire. Then there 
was a great rush down the hill for places on the 
steamer, and a solemn sort of sail for an hour in the 
moonlight, shut in by black walls of rock. The in- 
fluence was so depressing, that I kept making inward 
responses, "Good Lord, deliver us, miserable sinners!" 
I think there must always be a certain grave and 
sombre twist in the mind of one brought up among 
mountains. 

Next day we rode to the Grindelwald, a valley 
frowned down by bald-headed and hoary mountains, 
with two glaciers wedged forever between them in an 
awful depth of green ice. They looked very near, as 
if one could almost lay a hand on them ; and St. 
Ursula, whose ambition nothing can quench, walked 
and walked for more than an hour straight towards 
them, and they were just as far off as ever. 

A white stream and a dark one, like a blonde and 
brunette, two daughters of one mother, flow out of the 
glacier, and tear through the valley as if they never 
could get there in time. When we crossed the little 
carved bridges that span them at frequent intervals, 
the narrow current of chilly air always rising from the 
water struck our faces like an ice-cold hand. This was 
a breath from the frozen heart of the glacier. 

Wherever there is a bit of greensward on the 
12 



178 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

mountain -side, some times so high up as to be almost 
out of sight, there are sure to be a shepherd's hut and 
shelter for cattle. A bit of land will be cultivated 
where it looks as if a man would have to be let down 
by a cord in order to hoe it. Not a bad place to make 
way with an enemy, but the worst in the world for 
remorse. 

The prettiest daughter of Switzerland in the shape 
of a^waterfall is the StauVjbach (brook of dust), where 
the desperate water throws itself off a cliff, and does 
not touch bottom for so long that it is all fretted into 
such a cloud of dust as rises around carriage wheels in 
a dry day. Its gala-time is in the early morning, when 
the new sunshine stripes it with rainbows. On the 
way we pass through the valley of Lauterbrunnen 
(nothing but springs). Longfellow calls it the " Val- 
ley of Fountains-Only," where the rocks are piled up 
so high that one looks twice to see the top. They are 
in the shape of forts and castles, that look hand-made, 
but by the hands of giants. We were caught in a 
thilnder-storm, in which not only the springs, but the 
very fountain heads were broken up and poured upon 
us. We heard the giants play at ninepins down the 
gorges, as Rip Van Winkle did in the Kaatskills. 
Sometimes a cloud of mist hid the bases, and great 
masses of rock seemed to roll towards us, as if they 
hung in mid-air. 

It was a " fierce and fair delight " for the spirit, if 
the flesh had not been weak. What with the light- 
ning, and the floods, and the fast driving over break- 
neck places, we never repented of so many sins in so 
short a time in our lives. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 179 

Some people get up an intimacy with mountains at 
first sight ; but I can never overcome their awfulness. 
The Swiss scenery is most lovely to me where the 
Swiss people have lived and died bravely to defend it. 

The great bald-headed mountains, with snow five 
hundred feet deep about their peaks, hiding an occa- 
sional skeleton, do no good to anybody. Tliey are 
just useless masses of raw material left over when the 
world was made. 

Some one watching through a glass a party of guides 
and travellers creeping up the side of the Jungfrau, 
like a company of ants, saw a small white cloud de- 
tach itself from above and float lazily downward like a 
handkerchief, settling on the black specks. The place 
where they had been was all white, and the valley 
knew them no more. 

On the way home we saw a ruined tower, which is 
said and sworn to have been the identical castle of 
Bluebeard, where Fatima took the fatal key, and threw 
daylight on the other wives, while Sister Anne kept 
her post on the tower and looked for clouds of dust. 



180 BEATEN PATHS, OR 




CHAPTER XIII. 

SHORE OF I^AKE LEMAN'. 

" How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, 
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! 
And now again 'tis black, — and now, the glee 
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth 

As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth." 

Bykon. 

NEW thing under the snn carried us out of 
Interhxken — rail-carriages made like those in 
America, with seats on top and an awning overhead. 
A cool and royal road through Swiss scenery, the 
track skirts the lake so closely that we seem to liave 
faith enough to roll along the water itself. Then the 
steamer waited for us on the Lake of Thun, which 
doubles the endless vineyards in its bosom, and is too 
far from the sharp and snowy "Horns" to be depressed 
by them. The shore is studded with country-seats, so 
rich in flowers that whole hedges of them are crowded 
over its edge, and trail along the water in indolent 
wealth. 

"Do you see that very picturesque young man who 
has just come on board?" said Psyche to Juno. 

« No I Where ? " said Juno. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 181 

"O, never mind; I see he isn't mentioned in the 
guide-book." 

At Thun we took cars again, and crept on at a snail's 
pace — a habit of all the raih'oads in Switzerland, out of 
deference to the fine views. It is taken for granted 
that no one can possibly be in a hurry, and the train 
nearly always forgets something and goes back for it 
at every station. At Fribourg, a grand gymnastic fete 
tor all the Swiss cantons was just over, and the station 
bloomed with the paity-colored ribbons of the wrestlers. 
The winner of the second prize — a wreath of painted 
oak leaves — wore it on his uncovered head, and was 
warmly congratulated by his friends. The young men, 
as a rule, looked more healthy than handsome. 

In the distance, the fiimous suspension bridge of Fri- 
bourg looked like quivering braids of black hair thrown 
a,ci'oss the r.ivine from rock to rock. 

Berne is the Swissest of all Swiss towns; the best 
part of it is built on a natural terrace far above the 
roofs of the lower houses, so that it stands like a lady 
on her balcony, looking down at the green river, so fir 
below her feet, that it seems to stop its flow to look up 
again at her. 

They have rows of little booths down the middle of 
the main streets, where women with snowy handker- 
chiefs on their heads sell everything to all other women. 
The business looks more cheerful than profitable; but 
having no rent to pay, it need not lie heavy on their 
hearts. 

Every fountain has a row of devotees in the busy 
washerwomen ; and the oddest statue among many is 
an ogre copied out of a fairy tale, having a baby's head 



18? BEATEN PATHS, OR 

and shoulders in his raouth, with the chubby legs hang- 
ing out, and other fat morsels in the shape of children 
stuck in his pockets and belt. 

The sidewalks are arcaded, which give forth a faint 
reminder of sweet old English Chester; it is a fashion, 
however, which cannot fail to undermine the industry 
of a town, making loafing-places for people that would 
otherwise exert themselves to go in when it rained. 

The houses of parliament are so much like all others 
in second-rate countries, that it is hardly worth getting 
out of one's carriage to visit them. In the Chamber 
of Assembly every speech is translated into German, 
French, and Italian, which must have an exasperating 
effect on the maker of the speech, but gives to other 
folks an opportunity to study languages. 

In the cathedral is a great organ, of which the Bernese 
are almost as proud as the Bostonians of theirs; it 
plays the day to sleep every night in a twilight concert. 
The cathedral, like all others which were once Catholic 
and have seen the error of their ways, looks a little 
bare and lonely for want of its pictures and images of 
the Mother and Child. The charm of it lies now in 
the old churchyard, converted into a garden, where 
nuises and children play over the bones of their fore- 
fathers. 

Berne is the headquarters of Beardom. Everything 
that can be done by man is imitated by bears in stone, 
and wood, and metal. It is not difficult to imagine that 
the population have a bearish turn to their noses. 

The curious bear-dance, painted by Beard, which 
looked odd and quaint in Boston, is a very good picture 
of Berne. It is one long bear-dance, on every gate-post, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION-. 183 

to the clen ^^hero several live bears are kept at the ex- 
pense of the city; they attract a constant crowd, that 
feeds them with carrots and fruit. Baedeker, the apos- 
tle of guide-books, says that an English officer once 
fell into the den, and after a terrible fight with the 
bears, was torn in pieces. It seems to me that when i 
the history of the world is summed up by the last man, 
it will be found that whatever was not done by an Eng- ■. 

lisli officer or an American woman, was not worth doinar / 

/ 
at all. The irrepressible conflict will at last lie between • 

these two. 

The best-conducted coachman that ever drove seven 
women, put the whole of Berne into a two-hours' drive, 
bears and all, and drew up just at noon in front of the 
old clock on the watch-tower. On the stroke of twelve 
a troop of tiny bears, dressed like men, on foot and on 
horseback, travel round old Time in the middle, and a 
man in armor in the belfry beats the time on a bell; 
the inevitable rooster on one side flaps his wings and 
crows faintly three times. 

No one can forget the ride from Berne to Lausanne, 
because of the sudden and complete revelation of the 
Lake of Geneva just after passing through a long tun- 
nel. You go into it with no suspicion of anything 
about to happen, and you shoot out of pitchy darkness 
into the sweet light of heaven, and "clear, placid Le- 
man " lies at your feet. It is one of Mother Nature's 
surprises; the ineffiible glory of the lake bursts on the 
senses like glad news after a stretch of anxiety, or like 
heaven after a wasting sickness. Lausanne has crept 
well up the hill, and has a cleanly, reserved air, like 
English peojjle, with whom it has alw^ays been a favorite 



184 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

town. The houses keep one another at arm's length, 
and there is no susj^icion of the Koman fragrance in 
its streets. 

The Hotel Gibbon and its terrace look on the lake, 
and just below it, in the garden, is the same summer- 
house, or its successor, in which Gibbon wrote the last 
sentences of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire. He was sent to Switzerland in his youth to 
complete his studies, and regain the Protestantism that 
be had somehow lost, and there fell in love with Made- 
moiselle Curchon ; but, his father threatening to disin- 
herit him if he married her, he dutifully and selfishly 
gave her up. She married M. N^ecker, minister of 
Louis XVI., and became the mother cf Madame de 
Sta^l. In these matronly days Gibbon met her again, 
basked in her bright society, and wondered, man-like, 
that M. Necker was not in the least jealous. 

If the portraits of Gibbon do him justice, no one 
need wonder at M.Necker's tranquillity ; but there was 
another reason equally apparent to the student of wo- 
man-kind. I suppose one may have wit enough to fol- 
low the Roman empire down hill, and yet not enough 
to perceive that no husband of a fine woman has any 
cause to fear an old suitor, who once preferred his in- 
heritance to her love. 

On the terrace at the Hotel Gibbon, two Spanish 
ladies, with all the dark and glowing beauty of their 
nation, sat through the twilight smoking fat little ciga- 
rettes till they veiled themselves in a halo of smoke. 
Tliey had their rights in a way that American women 
have forgotten to fight for ; and they got more comfort 
out of it than Miss Anthony ever did in addressing a 
convention. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 185 

The Hotel Gibbon has his portrait below, and in the 
bedrooms a placard urging travellers to keep Sunday 
jDiously, and to remember that they have special need 
of divine care in their wanderings. Gibbon spent his 
whole life 

" Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer," 

and saw no beauty in Christianity that any one should 
desire it. 

The port of Lausanne is Ouchy, where Byron was 
once weather-bound, and wrote the Prisoner of Ghil- 
lon. The third canto of Childe Harold and Manfred 
were also written on the shore of Lake Leman, " com- 
posed," as he says, in a letter, " when I was half mad 
between mountains, metaphysics, lakes, loves unquench- 
able, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my 
own delinquencies ; " quite material enough for a vol- 
ume of poetry. 

The castle of Chillon, a lion whose roar would never 
have been heard out of Switzerland but for Byron's 
poem, is much lovelier in pictures than in the solid 
stone and mortar. Byron's prisoner was an imaginary 
one, as he had riot then studied the life of Bonnivard; 
he said afterwards that he would otherwise have digni- 
fied the poem with patriotic allusions; but sorrow and 
captivity have dignity enough of their own. A little 
bridge connects the castle with the main land, and it was 
long the torture-house of the Duke of Savoy (ancestor 
of Victor Emanuel) for Swiss prisoners. The dun- 
geons are lighted only by slits in a wall twenty feet thick. 
Bonnivard, a famous patriot among men who were all 
patriots, was chained to a pillar five years, and his rest- 



186 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

less feet wore a visible welt in the stone, like a scar on 
flesh. 

" My very chains and I grew friends." 

The poem speaks of "a little isle that smiled on him " 
through the hole in the wall, but it was only by climb- 
ing the pillar that he could see it at all. The "seven 
])illars of Gothic mould" are all there. Byron's poetry 
is often as good as a guide-book. 

The guide lights a match to show the rough stairway 
down which prisoners were brought to execution, and 
the beam to which they were hung. The air was thick 
with memories of the many unhappy souls that had 
dropped the body in that spot, and gone up "to appeal 
from tyranny to God." Farther on is the hole to which 
prisoners were led blindfold, and promised their liberty; 
they went down three or four steps, and then came a 
plunge of eighty-four feet into the waters of the l.'ike. 
They got their liberty forever; but let us hope that 
when the Duke of Savoy serves out his term of punish- 
ment hereafter, it may be well peppered with sarcasms* 

One author, named Simond, says, "It grieves me to 
contradict poets or sentimental travellers, but really the 
dungeon of Chillon is not under water, and besides, is 
absolutely a comfortable sort of dungeon enough, full 
forty feet long and fifteen feet high, with several narrow 
slits in the thick wall, above reach, but admitting air 
and light, and even some rays of the sun !" 

Where could this man Simond have been brought 
lip? Was he born in the cellar of a tenement-house 
in New York, which might occasionally be under water? 
and was his maturity spent in stone-cutting in state 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 187 

prison ? No other experience could have given a com- 
fortable air to Bonnivard's dungeon. The long-sufFer- 
ing Swiss took the castle at last, find in their joy they 
freed all the prisoners, and placed over the door the 
inscription, " Blessed be all who come in and go out." 
Afterwards, when this island prison was found too 
tempting a convenience for keej^ing some prisoners of 
their own, they erased the inscription for the sake of 
consistency. 

The shore of the lake, on the way from Chillon to 
Vevay, is dotted with villages that have long been the 
adopted children of poetry. 

*' Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love," 

was the home of the " divine Julie," Rousseau's heroine 
in his Nouvelle Heloise — the most voluptuous book 
that it ever entered even a Frenchman's head to con- 
ceive. It has been supposed that Kousseau chose 
Clarens as the scene of his novel more for the beauty 
of its name than anything else, as it is scarcely so beau- 
tiful as its neighbors. • "A pity 'tis, 'tis true," that poets 
have their necessities as well as others. 

Cleanliness is farther from godliness in Switzerland 
than with us, since Thursday seems to be their wash- 
ing day. On this particular Thursday, the lake shore 
was lined for miles with snowy linen spread to dry in 
the sun after having been washed in the lake. The 
washerwomen anchor their great tubs just in the edge 
of the lake ; then they put themselves in the tub and 
the soiled clothes in the lake. The farther one goes 
from home, the more one sees the commonest thinsfs 
tm-ned inside out, and begun at the other end. No 



188 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

wonder that the first traveller who wrote of what he 
saw was called the "father of lies." 

Vevay is another half-way house for travellers, full 
of hotels and pensions, like Interlaken ; it is a colony 
of foreigners, with a rich sprinkling of Americans. 
That treasure to his travelling countrymen, an Ameri- 
can dentist, has been long settled there, and a little 
experience with foreign artists in that profession gives 
emphasis to the remark of a German to us — "The 
Americans give strength to dentistry." 

The Hotel Monnet, or "Three Crowns," was as de- 
lightful as flowers, and gilding, and summer-time could 
make it. In the airy dining-room, opening on the lake, 
furnished with white and gold, we saw our travelling 
dresses, which had sustained three months' ravages, 
reflected in the eyes of our jewelled and furbelowed 
countrywomen, and were ashamed. "The body is the 
shell of the soul ; the apparell is the huske of that shell, 
and the huske often tells you what the kernel is," says 
old Quarles. It is a feeling worse than neuralgia, and 
akin to seasickness, when hundreds of feminine eyes 
are judging your soul by a dusty and weather-stained 
alpaca "huske." The fitness of things demanded in such 
a place that we should wear rainbow silks, and feed 
only on nightingales' tongues and peacocks' brains. 
One may travel comfortably with only a bag, and stay 
one's soul with common sense for ninety-nine days out 
of a hundred ; but on the hundredth, one is sure to go 
to some Aladdin's palace, where even religious princi- 
ple is not so sustaining as a well-made dress. 

We arrived just after a wedding in church between 
an American girl and a German baron, and the wed- 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 189 

ding breakfast was going on with all the flutter that a 
wedding creates in every country under the sun. I 
cannot help thinking that if there is no marrying or 
giving in marriage in the next world, what a stupid 
place it will be for women ! Everybody had been to 
the wedding, and bore testimony that the bride cried 
till her nose was red ; the bride's mother cried too, and 
the bridegroom's father cried hardest of all. As it is 
said to be a pure love match, with no money on either 
side,' the old gentleman may have had the best reason 
to cry. 

It is a long sail from Yevay to Geneva; the moun- 
tains on one side hold their skirts far back from the 
shore, and the lake lies a perpetual smile on Nature's 
face, pure and grand near Lausanne, but only good- 
natured till we approach Geneva, and Mont Blanc 
heaves its ice-peaks into sight like a great white cloud 
that has been anchored forever in one spot in the sky. 

Lake Leman is just as lovely as Byron said it was; 
he is always to be depended upon in the way of adjec- 
tives ; but it is too perfect to be altogether interesting, 
like people whose character is above criticism. Defects 
in a landscape are like small faults in our friends, a sort 
of milestones on which to measure our admiration. 

Coppet, seen from the lake, was Madame de Stael's 
refuge when Napoleon banished her from her beloved 
France. She amused herself well, however, by marry- 
ing a young man for love in her middle age. 



190 BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER XIV. 

" The bent of civilization is to make good things cheap." 

GENEVA is mistress of her lake. Its waters, 
striped with many shades of blue, make another 
sky beneath her feet ; at night the city lights on the 
bridges, shining far down into the clear water, seem to 
disclose hollow caves where water-nymphs and mer- 
maids toss about the rings and bracelets which delight 
the eyes of mortals in the daytime; every shop win- 
dow has a fringe of ladies hanging about it as if it held 
their household gods. 

One window of a plain little shop on the Grand Quai 
would beguile the strongest-minded woman that ever 
had a mission, or addressed a convention ; pearls, and 
diamonds, and emeralds lie about loosely, as if they 
might be had for the asking, — a delusion speedily dissi- 
pated when one does ask; there are diamond ear-rings 
that would be like carriage lamps on a woman's head 
in the darkest night; turquoises such as Shylock would 
not have parted with "for a wilderness of monkeys;" 
and rubies glowing with such a fiery radiance that one 
could almost believe, with the ancients, that they could 
feel impending misfortune and grow dull in sympa- 
thy. In Sir Thomas More's Utopia, only children and 



A WOMAN'S VACATION 191 

criminals were permitted to wear jewels, in order that 
no one need desire them ; but it seems to me that his 
wisdom overreached itself, since manv foolish souls 
would have become criminals for the sake of obtaining 
their hearts' delight. 

It was an old superstition that the emerald, with cold 
and clear green light, preserved chastity, and drove off 
evil spirits; it specially belongs to those born in June, 
and changes color with the moods of its owner. An 
old Persian writer says, "He who dreams of green 
gems will become renowned, and find truth and 
fidelity." The sudden fall of an emerald from its set- 
ting portends great loss ; a large emerald fell from the 
English crown at the coronation of George III., and 
when America seceded in his reign some old woman 
remembered the emerald. Opals are like expressive 
faces which never look twice alike, and, like some char- 
acters, owe all their beauty to a defect in their organ- 
ization ; it has been well called "a pearl with a soul in 
it." The turquoise means self-sacrificing love, and 
reconciles quarrelsome couples; which would seem to 
recommend it as a betrothal ring. It draws approach- 
ing trouble into itself, growing dull and apparently 
worthless till the danger is past ; but this trait only 
belongs to it when given, not when bought. The 
topaz heightened wit, and strengthened the intellect 
— fables pretty in themselves, and showing that pre- 
cious stones have always exercised a weird influence 
on the imagjination. 

One may resolve to rise above the fascination of such 
earthly dross and tinsel, just as one may resolve against 
the toothache, or seasickness, or love, or any other of 



192 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

the torments of this world ; and the resolve holds good 
till one's time comes. 

*' For not to desire, or admire, if a man could learn it, were more 
Than to walk all day, like a sultan of old, in a garden of spice." 

Lord Byron lived at Geneva for a few weeks, and 
complains bitterly that, though lie lived a virtuous life,, 
he got no credit for it; to him virtue was never its own 
reward. 

Calvin, the head saint of the Genevan calendar, lived 
a virtuous life, and got too much credit for it; when the 
people drove out the Roman Catholic bishop, and bowed 
their necks to Calvin's yoke, they fell out of the frying- 
pan into the fire, or off of Scylla into Charybdis, ac- 
cording as one is housewifely or classical. The bishop 
occasionally made a bonfire of a heretic, but he gave 
the survivors plenty of cakes and ale to make up for it. 
Calvin burned heretics too, but without the cakes and 
ale. His old chair, hard and straight-backed as his 
doctrine, is still standing in the cathedral. He ruled 
the city with a paternal (one might say with a step- 
paternal) severity. He laid every Genevese soul on 
his own Procrustean bed, and cut it off or stretched it 
out till it came to his measure. His throne was his 
pulpit, and his code of laws finally crystallized into 
that spiky old creed, against which tender souls bruise 
themselves to this day. As religious wars are always 
the bloodiest, so religious rule is the most tyrannical. 
Men are never so outrageously wicked as when they 
think they have God's warrant for it. 

Calvin was perpetuallyliurling inkstands at the devil, 
but he resembled him in that he made Geneva the 



A WOMAN" S VACATION. I93 

hottest place for sinners that the world has ever seen. 
He was not one of those who preach 

" With about as much real edification 
As if a great Bible, bound in lead, 
Had fallen and struck them on the head ; ** 

his words pierced between bone and marrow, and he 
weeded the city, for his lifetime, of all unrighteous- 
ness; it sprang up again, of course, after his death, but 
morality is still the fashion in Geneva. 

The Canton of Geneva is the smallest in Switzerland, 
— only fifteen miles broad, — and its arch-enemy, Vol- 
taire, said, "When I shake my wig, I powder the whole 
republic;" but it has always made a prodigious noise 
in the world. Yoltaire lived there like a prince, and 
coined a new sarcasm every day for the scathing of 
the pious city. He had a look of the eagle and the 
monkey, sensitive, irritable, sarcastic, and yet benevo- 
lent. Pope crystallized him in an epigram : — 

** Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, 
At once we think thee Milton, death, and sin." 

Rousseau was another thorn in Calvin's flesh; he 
sits placidly enough, a very mild-looking man, on his 
pedestal on the little island in the lake called by his 
name, while Calvin was too lofty in his humility to per- 
niit even a tombstone to bear his name. 

It was given to Rousseau to put forward the pre- 
posterous idea, for the first time, in a book called the 
Social Contract, that there was a mutual obligation 
constantly incurred betw^een the aristocracy and the 
13 



194 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

people ; with this i)ict established, it was easy to see 
that the nobility of all Europe were terribly in arrears. 
Calvin burned the book for its infidelity, which hurt 
nobody, while its politics sowed broadcast the red seeds 
of the Frencli Revolution. 

It must have been a good thing for an author to have 
an obnoxious book burned in the market-place; for, of 
course, the crowd who had not heard of it before, made 
haste to read it at once. Rousseau wrote "Emile," a 
famous treatise on education, in which he indsts on 
teaching by experience ; the child should be allowed to 
find out that fire is liurtful by burning himself, and that 
glass will cut his flesh "by driving his fist through the 
window in a fit of temper. He does not go so far as 
to say that he should find out the danger of a precipice 
by throwing himself over it, though that would be the 
natural inference. In these latter days, Mr. Herbert 
Spencer and others have revamped this theory, and 
made it look actually presentable, but it would gradu- 
ally eliminate mother-love from the training of children. 
Voltaire said of it, " When I read your treatise, I desire 
to creep on all-fours." 

Rousseau knew best, perhaps, of all word-artists who 
ever lived, how to paint every shade of love and senti- 
ment, and yet dropped his own children into the basket 
of tlie Foundling Hospital as soon as they were born. 

The chief apostle of Geneva, just now, is Father 
Hyacinthe, otherwise the Rev. Charles Loyson (Hya- 
cinthe being liis monkish name, assumed on taking the 
vows). He preaches in a dingy old hall, formerly a 
library, founded by Bonnivard, and used by Calvin ; it 
is filled with hard beaches without backs, and a large 



A WOMAN'S VACATION". 195 

proportion of the audience is always Araerican. It 
was evident that many of them could not understnod 
his words, but if one had been born deaf, one could 
still follow a dim meaning through the eloquence into 
which he coins his fieiy heart. He makes one "hear 
with eyes." He wore a white robe embroidered with 
silver, and a broad chasuble, white and crimson, with a 
shining cross on it; he would be a distinguislied-look- 
ing man anywhere, but in white, and silver, and crim- 
son, he is very noble indeed, having that two-storied 
head of whicli Sir Walter Scott's was a type. 

The mass w^as much shorter than in other Catholic 
churches, and was performed with so much devotion 
and earnestness that one saw only the service, and not 
the priest, till the sermon began. The burden of it 
was charity. He began with an urgent appeal in be- 
half of some poor families who had been burned out in 
Genev^a the night before, and lost their all. "We have 
pi'ayed to God to give us charity; let us look to it that 
we do not shut our heart's door in the face of the answer 
to our prayer when it comes." Afterwards he urged 
that* all true religion was founded on charity in the 
sense of love. 

The Protestant faith says, " Only believe," which is a 
j)artial and sometimes dangerous truth, for it may end 
in a mere sentimental tenderness that serves neither 
God nor men; the Catholic church lelies on works 
which may end in rites and superstitious observances; 
but the " Old Catholic " creed is founded on our Lord's 
immediate teaching, embodied in this rule: "Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy strength," 
&c., "and thy neighbor as thyself." One could obey 



196 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

the first command without the second, but one could 
never arrive at the second without the first. There 
are two doors into heaven, love and faith ; St. John 
opens the first, and St. Paul the second. Father Hya- 
cinthe preferred to go in by St. John's door. 

He has a dark, oval face, somewhat too overladen 
with flesh, nntil he waxes earnest, and the hidden fire 
of his deep-set black eyes flames out. It did so many 
times, as he dwelt on his love for the mother church 
that had nourished him in its bosom, and on the abuse 
now poured out on him by his old brethren. One of 
them had called him, in a Catholic journal, "a misera- 
ble foreign apostate." 

"It is true," he said, "I am most miserable, not only 
for my sins, as others are, but for my suflerings." It 
must be a tremendous change to him from preaching 
in the "Madeleine," in Paris, to the most splendid con- 
gregation in Europe, followed by adulation of the most 
delicious kind, and now standing in the face of slander 
to preach a doctrine despised by all his old friends, and 
listened to chiefly by strangers and aliens out of curi- 
osity. I suppose, however, there is a sweetness in vol- 
untary martyrdom only known to those who try it, and 
I hope the tender arms of his baby-son w^ard off many 
evil strokes. Madame Loyson has a sweet, motherly 
face, but is not handsome. She was a rich American 
widow when Father liyacinthe married her, but became 
poor in the failure of Bowles Brothers, a stroke follow- 
ing close upon his marriage, which made a sweet morsel 
under the tongues of his enemies. 

From this modest "upper chamber" we went over 
the hill to the Russian church, a square stone building 



A WOMAN'S VACATION-. 197 

surmounted by five large balls, gilded and glittering in 
the sun ; these balls signify the world, and on them 
rests the crescent, with crosses rising triumphantly 
above them, showing that the Christian religion has 
overcome that of Mahomet. The interior is glorious 
with pictures and precious stones. The audience 
stands through the service, which is never long, as there 
is no sermon. A single bench runs along the side for 
strangers. Only one lady occasionally used a camp- 
chair. She was dressed entirely in white, a long cash- 
mere robe, and fleecy Shetland shawl, with a bonnet 
and long veil of white crape; two great diamonds 
hung from her ears Hke drops of dew ; her face was 
fair and peaceful, and every few minutes she sank grace- 
fully on her knees, and bent her forehead to the floor in 
a great snowy heap. The Russians use black for mourn- 
ing, as we do ; but on the occasion of a birthday of the 
one whom they mourn, or for a wedding, they have this 
lovely fashion of putting on pure white. No instru- 
ment of music is permitted in the Greek church, and 
the hymns were sung by four men. Two golden 
screens, with paintings of the angel holding out a 
branch of lilies to the Virgin, shut in the altar-room 
and the priest from the gaze of the people ; but after a 
time these doors were opened, and the priest came out 
muttering prayers over and over, and swinging a cen- 
ser. In the Greek churches, the service of the com- 
munion is performed by the priest alone, out of sight, 
and the bread and wine are only shown to the people. 
He wore a gorgeous robe of blue and gold brocade, and 
did his part with an impressive seriousness; but his 
audience were at one moment striking their foreheads 



198 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

on the ground and ciossing themselves, and at the next 
shaking hands with one another and walking about 
from friend to friend. The best-conducted person on 
the premises was a 4)aby about two years old, prema- 
turely draped in jacket and trousers, who miglit have 
been an example to us all in devout manners. At the 
last, the priest brought out a cross, and all the men, 
women, and children crowded about him to kiss it. It 
seemed to bring the whole multitude, rich and poor, 
refined and sordid, suddenly on a level; and against my 
will, I felt a Protestant disgust. 

The broad steps on which the priest stood were car- 
peted with worsted-work, and on each side stood tall 
banners of velvet and gold, studded with gems; the 
service w^as in the Sclavonic language, nowhere spoken 
at this time except in church, but all Russians learn it. 
The air was heavy with incense, and the brilliant colors 
reminded one of the temple that Solomon built after 
God's owm pattern — there was no lack of solemnity 
and prostration, but, somehow, one kept wondering how 
one got in without a ticket. 

The priests of the Russian or Greek church cannot 
be priests until they are married, nor can they have but 
one wife; when she dies they become monks; hence 
it follows, that the wives of Greek priests are nearly as 
well treated as the wives of good Americans. A trav- 
eller in Russia found a priest doing the family washing 
to save his wife's bones. A similar rule, if it could be 
introduced among the Protestant clergy, would prolong 
the life of many a feeble woman who is now cumbered 
with much serving. It is founded on that text about 
a bishop's having one Vrife; but on the other hand, a 



A WOMAN'S VACATION 199 

Russian priest, outside his church, has no position, nor 
can exact any deference. Among the best families, his 
place is "below the salt," as the fashion was in the old 
English time when the parson and the lady's maid were 
thought a good match. The peasants pay him no re- 
spect, and his best protection is to carry the sacrament 
on his person; he then becomes sacred, and even a 
noble who should abuse him would be doomed to Si- 
beria. Since Peter the Great humbled the patriarch 
by taking church appointments into his own hands., 
Russian veneration has been spent on religion itself, 
and not on its ministers, so that they can never split 
on the rock of anybody's infallibility, as the old and 
new Catholics have done lately. 

The Russian ladies, in the little Genevan church, had 
peculiarly intelligent faces, many of them of great deli- 
cacy of profile. As I watched them, my thoughts went 
back to that first Christian woman of their race in the 
twelfth century, the Grand Du'jhess Olga, to whom they 
owe their beautiful service. That famous old rajah, 
who always asked, "Who is she?" when anything bad 
happened, was right as far as he went; but the ques- 
tion is equally pertinent when good things come about 
strangely. 

This Christian Olga could not convert her husband, 
nor her son ; but the seed fell on good ground, at last, 
in her grandson, Vladimir, who wearied of paganism, 
and sent embassies to Mecca^ Constantinople, and 
Rome, to look into " other folks' religions, and bring 
home the best. The Greek form found favor in their 
eyes from its magnificent ceremonies — the rude Rus- 
sian visitors actually mistook some of the white-robed 



200 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

priests for angels, and were not undeceived by their 
entertainers. Vladimir and all his subjects were 
straightway baptized ; and so difficult was it to find 
Christian names for such multitudes that whole squad- 
rons received one name, thus creating a thousand Johns 
and Peters in a moment. No woman could ask a nobler 
monument through all time than a great Christian na- 
tion, but other honors are constantly paid to her name ; 
in the Russian royal family there is always a Grand 
Duchess Olga. 

The " ariowy Rhone " throws itself, all dusty and 
travel-stained from its mountain journey, into Lake 
Leman, at Bouveret, and rushes out again at Geneva 
as if it were tired to death of stillness and placidity, 
but it comes out pure and clear as an Alpine crystal. 
It is so terribly clear, so utterly transparent, that there 
is no temptation to drown one's self, or anybody else, 
in its waters ; one can almost count the blades of grass 
on the bottom of the lake. 

Rows of women in the washing-sheds, which are built 
into the middle of the stream, beat it all day with their 
linen, and fret its headlong course a little ; one will be 
wringing a blue blouse, and the next below her an em- 
broidered handkerchief^ but no drop of water stays long 
enough to be used twice ; they have no need, either, to 
blue their clothes ; nature has done that for them in 
the sapphire color of the river. It never ceases its 
hurry till it meets the Arve, and they join hands in a 
loveless wedding, the blue stream and the muddy one 
running side by side for a long distance, till at last the 
wdiole soul of the Rhone is corrupted, the two rivers 
become one, and that one is the dirty Arve. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 201 

" TIiou slialt lower to his level day by day, 
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay, 
As the husband is, the wife is : thou art mated with a clown, 
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee 
down." 

The meeting of these two rivers is such an obvious 
example of evil communication corrupting good man- 
ners that the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot help 
reading the lesson; and as a large proportion of way- 
farers are clergymen, the Arve and the Rhone have 
moistened many a dry sermon. Pitt made them flow 
through one of his most famous speeches, comparing 
them to a cabinet formed of good and bad ministers, 
which finally became unanimously bad. 

A few miles out of Geneva, one of the Barons Roths- 
child has a country-seat which must certainly be an im- 
provement on the Garden of Eden, in its view of the 
lake and the distant mountains. The Rothschild family 
always make a good bargain even with Nature, so that 
in this perfect place, Nature has contributed at least 
half the perfection. 

The hotels of Geneva are always crowded in the 
season with Americans. They really come abroad to 
see each other, and every second face in the street is 
that of one's countryw^oraan. Every one of them buys 
a watch, and pays any price that the shopman has the 
face to ask; such reckless shopping wquld spoil the 
most pious market that ever was trained by Calvin. 

They have brought America with them to Geneva in 
the shape of elevators and rocking-chairs. As the twi- 
light fell softly on the lake, I saw a familiar shape among 
the flowers and fountains of the hotel garden. I ap- 



202 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

proached it slowly, fearing an optical delusion, but it was 
actually a rocking-chair, the first one I had seen for three 
long months, and I settled softly into it as one clasps an 
old friend. A lady who made a long sea-A^oyage told me 
that she could never decide which she missed most, 
ice-water or society — in European travel, the great 
dearth is ice-water and rocking-chairs. 

After a day or two in a hotel full of Americans, we 
sought and took possession of a "pension" on the lake, 
kept by a French family, who spoke no English, and at 
last felt ourselves abroad. It had the air of an old 
French chateau, shut into large grounds by ample 
gates, and its lawn bounded by a semicircle of orange 
trees in 'green tubs. It was on this lawn that a feast 
of fat things was spread for the "Arbitrators," and all 
other Americans then in Geneva, on the Inst fourth of 
July before the dolorous failure of Bowles Brothers. 
Juliet misrht have been at home on the little rustic bal- 
cony, with a pane or two of stained glass, which gave 
my uncarpeted and prosaic little loom a most poetical 
air. There is no French habit so fiscinating as that of 
making common things pretty at small expense ; when 
we have imported so many French fashions, 'tis a pity 
we have left that out. 

In our tirn.e there were in the house Spaniards, Rus- 
sians, Greeks, Italians, Japanese, French, Swedes, and 
Americans. Our gathering at table must have resem- 
bled the first meals of our ancestors after the confusion 
of tongues, except that we could all speak more or less 
French; it was considerably less than more in the case 
of the solitary Japanese, who could barely ask for coffee 
and bread, and so keep himself from starvation. He 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 203 

had the finest teeth in the world, and he would smile 
and smile at us, out of his loneliness, with true Eastern 
courtesy, but he never spoke. What a bottled-up state 
a man's mind must be in whose communication is liter- 
ally, as the apostle recommended, "Yea, yea," and 
"Nay, nayl" I suppose fermentation would come 
sooner to a woman. 

Of all these foreigners, the most foreign was Mr. H., 
the head-centre of Spiritualism — for the others were 
only alien in birth and language, while his career had 
put him a little outside of all other humanity. One 
cannot be in the same house with him for a day with- 
out perceiving that he is a mere bundle of nerves, and 
capable of going into a trance more easily than other 
people go to sleep. 

He calls himself a relative of the historian Hume, 
since a pedigree of some sort is a useful thing to have 
in. European courts; he has a talent for mimicry, and a 
memory so wonderful, that he might have made an 
honorable fame with half the labor that he has spent 
on notoriety. He was suifering from paralysis at this 
time, induced, no doubt, by excess of nervous exertion; 
and he had the hunted, uneasy look in his eyes of one 
who is liable to be brought to bar at any moment, and 
can never relax his watch upon his enemies. He was 
banislied from Rome, — an episode in his eventful life 
of which he could not be more proud if he had been a 
martyr for preaching the gospel, — and he found favor 
in the eyes of the Russian emperor, who was glad tc» 
hear any new thing under the sun ; and what was more 
to Mr. H.'s purpose, paid him in great diamonds, as an 
emperor should. 



204 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

He had a beautiful Russian wife, whom he had con- 
verted to Spiritualism, like Mahomet, who took pains 
to convince his wife Fatima of the divine origin of the 
Koran before he tried anybody else. Mrs. H. was so 
rich in jewels that she wore pearls to breakfast, and 
might have dissolved one or two in her wine, like Cleo- 
patra, and never missed them. Her husband assured 
us that she was as perfect as a woman could be, with- 
out being an idiot. 

He had with him two tall sons of a Russian baroness, 
and they all kissed each other affectionately on parting 
for the night. It is said that masculine appreciation 
of women kissing one another is of the slightest ; but 
two mustaches twining together in a manly embrace, 
is a sight, from which gods and women would turn 
away their eyes I 

One leaf in Mr. H.'s laurel wreath is his supposed 
conversion of Mi's. Browning to Spiritualism. Her 
husband embalmed him in a long satirical j^oem, under 
the name of Mr. Sludge, which seems to me much like 
preserving flies in amber. Poets have a wasteful habit 
of using the wine of their genius in which to pickle 
their enemies, not seeing, in their blind anger, that they 
bestow a gift of immortality that their happy victims 
would never obtain of themselves. 

A famous sinner, who had made his home in Geneva 
for many years, died there, during our stay, and was 
buried in great state by a rejoicing city; this was the 
rich and wicked Duk\3 of Brunswick, who took his 
wickedness with him, and left his riches to Geneva. 
They began to lay out their schools and hospitals be- 
fore he was cold; but there was one little worm-hole 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 205 

in the fair apple of their content; a lawsuit was one 
item of their legacy. 

It would have rejoiced the soul of Calvin, and curled 
the lip of Voltaire, to have read the newspaper com- 
ments on this piece of luck; and how exultantly they 
looked their gift-horse in the mouth, and praised the 
wise generosity of the giver, while maintaining a dead 
silence on all his other qualities ! 



206 BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER XV. 



CHAMOUNIX. 




Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains ; 

They crowned him long ago 
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, 

With a diadem of snow. — Byron. 

"ONT Blanc is as chnngeable as a woman, some- 
times sharp and white, as if it never could 
alter, then getting gray and hoary, as if old age had 
suddenly fallen on it like a blight, and again disappear- 
ing: altoofether, so that for hours there is no Mont Blanc 
at all, as far as Geneva is concerned. 

Chamounix and its belt of hills are the real recep- 
tion-rooms of the monarch. In a nearer approach one 
pays back more or less of the enchantment that distance 
lent the view, as one sometimes loses reverence for 
famous people by becoming too intimate with them. 
One may lift the snowy veil that makes Mont Blanc 
the Madonna of mountains; but it is at the price of 
much substance, both of body and purse, and after all 
there is no beauty like the unapproachable. A veiled 
nun is romantic and stimulating to the imagination, 
when in reality she may be of the roughest Hibernian 
clay, and marked with the small-pox. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 207 

A woman is never so lovely to ber lover as in the 
distance. When parents stood jealously between 
daughters and their suitors, bow stately and angelio 
were all the heroines of novels and poetry, cold as ice- 
peaks, and only melting to love seven times heated ! 
but since young women have stepped down^ from the 
old pedestal, and banished father and mother to the 
back parlor, the whole tone of fiction and society is, 
" Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad." 

So the royalty of Mont Blanc, when it was reserved 
and inaccessible, could not be made glorious enough. 
Coleridge bowed down to it like a divinity in his Hymn 
to Chamouny,- — 

" Thou kingly spirit throjied among the hills, 
Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven ; " 

but since it has been ascended by armies of lean trav- 
ellers, and its deepest mystery photographed, everybody 
speaks lightly of it, as of a next-door neighbor. 

Thackeray comments on Swiss scenery as he would 
speak of a dinner party of intelligent people who did 
not wholly live to eat. "It is delightful to be in the 
midst of Alpine scenes — the ideas get generous reflec- 
tions from them. It is keeping good company. It is 
keeping away mean thoughts." 

Our journey from Geneva to Chamounix lay through 
forty miles of rain, a steady down-pour, as if the moun- 
tains and valleys were having one of those tri-monthly 
washings, which put a German family under water for 
a day or two. The road made safe by Napoleon is 
said to have been wonderfully picturesque by birth- 
right; but I ask no one to take my word for it. I was 



208 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

enclosed in a mass of twenty people, dripping about 
the edges and damp in the middle. It was an open 
carriage by nature, with a canvas awning over it, con- 
trived solely with a view to dry scenery. The rear 
was weighed down with a party of middle-class Eng- 
lish, who sat and glowered at one another as only 
English can, till they were stayed with food and com- 
forted with wine at the little half-way house, and then 
their heavy British wit began to roll around the car- 
riage like thunder among mountains. Opposite to us 
were a couple from Uruguay, with their little negro 
servant, " God's image cut in ebony," the only one of 
the company to whom rain and shine were equally a 
satisfaction. Who ever saw a negro look worried? 
One would almost consent to be black with that com- 
pensation. On one side were Beauty and the Beast 
('tis amazing how often they go on their travels), in 
the shape, this time, of an "ancient mariner" and his 
fair, soft little wife, who looked as if she had never 
put her foot to the ground for delicacy. They had a 
small but troublesome family, • consisting of a Scotch 
terrier, so minute that it was carried in a hand-basket 
in its mistress's lap, and it seemed to me that their 
journey was conducted chiefly for the education of the 
terrier. If the curtains were lifted for a moment to 
view a waterfall or a rocky defile, the cover of the 
basket was lifted too, that the dog might have the 
benefit. A child would have flourished like a green 
bay tree on half the attention that was wasted on this 
little beast ! 

Nothing is more amazing in human nature than the 
devotion of middle-aged women to dogs — women, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 209 

who think themselves fortunate that they have had no 
children. A dog is never anything but a dog, if yo\i 
keep him twenty years, whereas the comfort and joy 
of a child increase at compound interest, and no two 
years of its life are alike. On the other side was a 
Spanish mystery, shaped like a man, who looked 
straight before him for forty miles, holding an un- 
lighted cigarette between his lips, always at the same 
angle. No one saw him get out or in. To this day I 
think he was a wax figure ■ provided by the diligence 
company to fill up an empty seat. 

The real martyr of the ride was a guide in a blue 
blouse, who sat on the bottom of the carriage, swing- 
ing his legs over the wheels, and soaking in rain all 
day like a sponge. He sat at the feet of a passenger 
with an aureole of flame-colored hair and beard about 
his face, who, with the touch of cruelty, which seems 
innate with that temperament, amused himself with 
making minute streams of water run oflf his umbrella 
down the neck of the luckless guide, who could not 
escape, turn which way he would. ' It was the old 
story of the boy and the frogs. We had nothing to 
do but to study each other, and make laughter keep 
out rheumatism. 

"■I think," said the "ancient mariner," "that these 
people from Uruguay have probably got rich keeping 
a groggery, and having a married daughter in Europe, 
came over to see what it was like." The people from 
Uruguay were looking straight in his face when he 
pronounced sentence on them, but they were none the 
wiser. It is a perilous pleasure to abuse people to 
their faces in another language, but not one to be 
14 



210 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

practised with impunity. When the abused person an- 
swers unexpectedly in the same language, then we are 
ready to call on the rocks to fall down and cover us. 
Mrs. Mariner dreaded this result, and tried to hush her 
reckless husband; but all in vain. He was wholly de- 
voted to her in tucking her in from the rain and secur- 
ing for her every possible morsel of comfort, at the 
sacrifice of his own. He was ready to be her foot- 
stool ; but he would not take her advice. She had the 
semblance of power without the substance, "love and 
cherishing" with "honor" left out. 

I don't think that little word "honor" in the mar- 
riage promise has ever had its due. There is a great 
fuss made about the " obey ; " but if it were truly 
wedded to " honor," they are a couple that would pull 
well tosrether forever and ever. It is sweet to be 
physically beloved, to have cloaks laid down over 
muddy places like a queen, and to be screened from 
every wind of heaven like a first-born baby; but 
sweeter far is it to be listened to and heeded, though 
one must walk in rubber boots^ and bear with a cold 
shoulder now and then. " Strike, but hear me," is not 
the worst motto in the world for a wife's flag. 

The flapping curtains of our carriage parted between 
whiles that we mi^:ht look at some mountain torrent 
tumbling superfluously over the rocks, not seeing that 
its occupation was gone, since all heaven was a water- 
fall. Rarely we met a woman paddling through the 
flooded fields — 

"Alone, unfriended, melancholy, slow." 

It was always a woman — the men were all in-doois, as 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 211' 

became those superior beings. There is but one bit 
of work in Switzerland not performed by women ; they 
are never guides — perhaps because there is money 
to be made by it. They carry burdens bigger than 
themselves up the ladder-like sides of their mountains, 
but they do not lead travellers. In the mountain vil- 
lages, hundreds of men live by whittling, making every 
mortal thing out of wood that that material will sub- 
mit to. Whole villages also will be devoted to making 
over and over one wheel or one spring of a watch, 
which are carried to Geneva nnd fitted to other springs 
and wheels that have travelled down from other moun- 
tains — a watch bought there may have been thin- 
spread all over Switzerland. 

Until this wet ride my eyes had been mercifully 
withheld from seeing the national curse — the goitre; 
but when the diligence stopped for lunch, an old woman 
came to the side with a terrible growth under her chin, 
at least a foot long, as of a bunch of beets or carrots 
dragged out of the ground with earth clinging to 
them. A sight for a nightmare ; and yet the old crea- 
ture looked as if she had a sort of pride in it, the 
vegetable outgrowth of ages of filth and bad air. 
Was there ever a curse so black that conceited hu- 
manity would not wring a secret drop of comfort out 
of it? 

The next morning the Chamounix Valley was sweet 
and fresh as a lusty baby after a bath, and we found 
"a thing to do" right speedily — to cross the Mer de 
Glace, the cast-off garments of Mont Blanc, which 
have fallen between two lower heights, and lie frozen 
there in hundreds of feet of green ice shining like 
chrysoprase. 



212 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

We mounted our mules at the hotel door and rode, 
single file, up the rocky stairs of the Montanvert, a 
wooded hill Avhich serves as a footstool from which to 
look in the face of Swiss royalty. 

My mule had grown near-sighted in his old age, and 
insisted on climbing the very edge of the precipice, 
either to see his home in the valley better, or to be 
certain Avhere the etlge was. With the exception of 
this little weakness, he was all that one could desire in 
an intimate friend among mules. With a stout pair 
of eye-glasses he would have been perfect. 

If one has any iaith left in m;in, the idiosyncrasy of 
the Swiss mule dont matter much, as a guide leads 
each one by the bridle. These Swiss guides are a class 
by themselves, a serious, worthy, wrinkled set of men, 
fed upon danger from childhood, as it had been bread 
and butter. 

St. Ursula made long discourses with them in her 
best French, — she would draw out a Hottentot's views 
of politics and religion, — and these were her results. 
The province of Savoy, in which Chamounix is situat- 
ed, having passed from Italian to French rule within 
a few years, these men did highly approve the change, 
since taxes were lower. Furthermore, they preferred 
to guide Americans rather than other travellers, be- 
cause they were so lavish of their money. They had 
been known to give as much as five francs to a guide 
for his dinner. I know not whether all their ideas and 
opinions had roots in their pockets ; but these two 
were enough to make them men and brethren. 

We were already blest in this Chamounix journey 
with six feet of manly escort, brimful of true American 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 213 

kindness. to bis lonely countrywomen, which ought to 
have been enough for us, since we had fought our own 
battle so long. However, it never rains but it pours, 
and just here we fell in with the " Fairy Prince." 
According to Tennyson, he had broken the hedge, 
waked the sleeping princess with a kiss, and carried 
her "across the hills and faraway" with him ages ago; 
but here he was again, as young as ever. 

" He travels far from other skies — 
His mantle glitters on the rocks — 
A fairy prince with joyful eyes, 
And lighter-footed than the fox." 

He wore a suit of brown knickerbockers instead of 
a glittering mantle, and he presented his card like other 

people — of course it was only plain Mr. ; but 

that was his disguise, as other princes of royal birth 
call themselves mere count or baron on their travels. 
He bestrode his mule as if it had been a "fiery, un- 
tamed steed of the desert," and he ordered impossible 
dinners on little shelves of the rock, which nevertheless 
came to pass in due season as by magic. He had the 
true fairy talent for making arrangements, so that his 
companions seemed to slide down an inclined plane to 
\ the desire of their hearts. It was a great blow to 
some of us when he spoke of his wife -^ why did I at 
once think of Mahomet's father, who was so handsome 
that on his wedding day two thousand virgins made 
an end of themselves in their despair? — for it proved 
that he had already found the princess and made that 
little journey " across the hills and far away," like his 
ancestor. 



214 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

We broke the news gently to Juno, but — 
''the subsequent proceedings interested her no more.'* 

It is odd how instantly some women lose interest in 
a man when they discover that he is married. It is 
almost the sole exception to the rule that only the 
unattainable is w^orth having. To me, there is a 
troublesome uncertainty in the manner of a bachelor, 
as if he never quite knew where his feet might carry 
him ; but a married man can call his soul his own with 
no sort of misgiving how anybody will take it. In our 
case the princess was indeed far away — at least three 
thousand miles — taking care of the heir to the throne, 
and for two endless summer days her prince went 
across the hills with us. 

The blackness of desolation is a familiar phrase; but 
looking down from the Montanvert on the ancient 
ravages of the glacier, that "frozen hurricane," and its 
two cold arms, the Arve and the Arveiron, reaching 
out of the valley to cool the rest of the world, one 
begins to learn the meaning of the whiteness of desola- 
tion. We leave our mules here for a season, those for- 
tunate animals not being able to walk on ice, and after 
scrambling down the rocky wall that was intended by 
Nature to fence in her ice ti'easure from all human 
meddling, we draw on knitted shoes and begin our 
walk over fathomless ice under the midsummer sun. 
Our feet touch the frigid zone and our head the torrid. 
Steps are cut along a winding path, and there is no 
danger if one could resist looking over the edge of the 
yawning cracks, into which one drops a stone and hears 
it rebound against the green walls of ice long after it 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 215 

is out of sight. These crevasses have an uncomfort- 
able habit of breaking out in a new spot sometimes; 
but the ice groans and heaves long enough beforehand 
to warn people away from its neighborhood. 

The glacier is more beautiful in a picture, because 
Nature is not a good housekeeper, never wiping the 
dust of ages off its face. It was evidently intended to 
be looked at from a distance, and the black specks in 
water-proof cloaks crawling over it all summer are an 
impertinence to its grand loneliness. It ought to be 
let severely alone. One seems to be looking on about 
the evening of the third day of creation, when the 
waters were gathered together in one place and the 
dry land appeared ; but there were yet twenty-four 
hours before "the grass and the herb yielding seed, and 
the fruit tree yielding fiuit after its kind," had been 
heard of It may well be the place where all the waste 
material left over, after that six days' work, was thrown 
to get it out of the way, "the fret-work of an earth- 
quake." It bears down small talk and travelling jokes 
like a death in the house; only those whose souls 
habitually walk "on the heights" retain their cheer- 
fulness without an effort. 

Crossing the ice is nothing; it is but the first skirmish 
of the battle. After such scrarablinsf as makes one 
take back some old strictures on the Bloomer costume, 
one creeps, and jumps, and almost wiithes along the 
side of a perpendicular rock, like drunken flies on a 
wall. There is nothing above us but rock and sky, 
and nothing below but more rock added to the glacier 
and destruction — the downward look is the most in- 
teresting. An iron railing has been welded into the- 



216 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

path. With one hand clutching this, and sticking 
closer than a brother to my guide, I passed over the 
Mauvais Pas, or "Bad Step." If there are worse steps, 
I desire never to take thera. It is not a bad type of 
the return journey from " facilis descensus Averni." I 
know nothing of the scenery along this perilous walk, 
but I can tell the number of threads in my guide's 
coat-collar, to which I nailed my dizzy eyes; but there 
is no " bad step " in the world for some people. One 
of us in a trailing skirt skimmed over this danger like 
a young and fool-hardy chamois. 

Nothing demonstrates the superior strength of the 
female body over that of man (however much it may 
impugn her common sense) than to see a woman 
wrapped in heavy and clinging skirts do easily what 
men find difficult without that drawback. A woman 
gives them several points in the matter of clothes, and 
often wins after all. Sir John Mandeville says he never 
felt so devout as when he was passing through the 
Dangerous Valley. It may not be difficult to be an 
infidel on smooth ground, but on the "bad steps" of 
this world, a stout belief in the " everlasting arms," 
and angels standing around, "lest thou trip thy foot 
against a stone," is a handy thing to have about one. 
There was one flying leap from one little stone bracket 
to another, after which, had I been a good Catholic, I 
would have vowed a candle to the Virgin at least five 
feet long. 

Only the day before our visit, the Bad Step had its 
latest tragedy, with a comic edge to it, as most trage- 
dies have. In the pouring rain a party left the hotel 
at Chamounix for the Mer de Glace, and coming up on 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 217 

the other side, took the Bad Step first. The sweetest 
of little old ladies, a mere dot of a woman, with her 
doctor of divinity, were among them, and went on 
over the slippery rock made doubly dangerous by the 
rain, because once started there was no turning back. 
She dragged the pounds on pounds of wet water-proof 
cloth clinging about her feet to the little oasis, where 
people rest and gird up their loins before crossing the 
ice. Here she threw herself prone on the ground, and 
was still as an ink blot. When the others started, her 
husband tried to rouse her. " No," she said ; " you 
may all go on. I want nothing. I will die here!" 
It was the calmness of despair; women often threaten 
in certain contingencies to '•''give up;'''* but the thing is 
rare as snow in August. When it happens, the family 
machine stops and desperate remedies are applied. 
This woman did the thing without the threat, also a 
rare thing in her sex; and was ever doctor of divinity 
in such a plight before? He had lived with her forty 
years, and she yet had power to surprise him. He had 
seen her endure years of wasting sickness without los- 
ing cheerfulness. He had seen her go down into the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death and come back smiling 
with a baby in her arms; but now at last she had 
"given up." He offered to carry her down the rocks 
and across the ice — he who had come abroad for his 
health; but she answered him only, "Go with the rest. 
I will die here!" like the refrain of a diige. The 
doctor must have scolded at this point, if he were not 
more than mortal; but it did no good, and finally he 
wrapped the mantle of his thoughts about him, and sat 
down in the rain to meditate a new chapter on the 



218 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

woman question. The other people went on, and the 
two kept solitary watch on the Mer cle Glace like two 
gray-headed eagles in an eyrie. At the end of a silent 
half hour, in which the doctor discovered vv'hat very 
liard-working people those are who " only stand and 
wait," she rose up, walked over the ice, mounted her 
mule, and regained the hotel. She had broken the 
main-spring of hope, and it took Nature just half an 
hour to mend it. 

We found a little box of a restaurant at the end of 
the Bad Step, clinging to the rock as if it had rolled 
down the mountain side and lodged there. We would 
not have scorned the "dinner of herbs;" but we had 
the " stalled ox " and " contentment therewith." In a 
bottle of enthusiasm, which went by another name in 
the bill, we drank to those we loved, and again to 
those who loved us. Some hasty people might think 
they were one and the same; but every discriminating 
mind perceives that they are two very different drinks. 

"Now they all sat or stood 
To eat and to drink, 
And every one said 

What he happened to think," — 

as they did at the wedding of Cock Robin and Jennie 
Wren, and I know no surer test of the enjoyment of 
any company. 

Our lust toast was, " Our enemies, may God forgive 
them ! " 

"For we never will," added the Fairy Prince; and 
then we found our mules, and rattled our bones over 
the stones back to the hotel. Juno ran a mule-race 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 219 

with the prince, and her guide assured her that she 
had "the habitude of a horse." All the rest of us 
trailed far behind them, looking as if our dolls were 
stuifed with sawdust, and we did not care who knew 
it. It had been a day of days, and it "died of its own 
glory," transmuting Mont Blanc by sunset alchemy 
into a solid mass of burnished gold. This is called 
the "After-glow," and in a few minutes the mountain 
fades again into a cold white cloud. This change is 
like a sudden blinding gleam of delight which fades 
out as if it had never been, when the twilight of com- 
mon sense settles on it. 

The region of Mont Blanc has a wonderfully hihlical 
effect — mountainous texts float uppermost in the mem- 
ory. That splendid psalm in the prayer book which 
calls on every created thing, " stars and winds, ice and 
snow, mountains and hills, to praise the Lord and 
magnify him forever," keeps chanting itself in every 
mind that is familiar with it. Mont Blanc is a great 
white hand on the guide-board of the sky, pointing to 
the fact more easily forgotten than any other, "Be ye 
sure that the Lord he is God ; it is he that hath made 
us and not we ourselves." All the funerals in the 
world could not put a sharper point uj^on it. 

The Swiss are a pious and God-fearing race. Their 
mountains continually do preach to them like Evan- 
gelists, and they are converted in spite of themselves. 

Anybody can make a flat country by flUing in a 
bay — Boston made miles of it, and thought no more 
about it; but among high mountains their Maker seems 
to be still walking where Moses spoke with him. Mr. 
Beecher says he never realized how much w^ork it was 



220 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

to put the world together until he tried to make a hill 
four feet high. 

In the early moi-ning we were packed into springless 
wagons drawn by mules for .-x drive of twenty-four 
miles over the Tete Noire (Black Head) pass to Mar- 
tigny. I saw the last of Chamounix in the shape of 
my near-sighted mule. I bowed to him, but he took 
no notice — Ae may have forgotten our short friend- 
ship, but I never shall. 

The breath of a Swiss morning is sweet and sharp 
as the flavor of a pine-apple. It cheers and inebri- 
ates too. The mountains are black and bleak beyond 
telling; but they are not so unnecessarily high as 
Mont Blanc and the other snow-peaks. A cheerful 
little stream, white with foam, bathes their roots, and 
now and then, high up on the side, nestles a broad- 
brimmed village like a cluster of birds' nests on a tree- 
top. Frisky waterfalls that have never been sobered 
by the drudgery of turning a mill-wheel plunge reck- 
lessly down the mountain, and break into a shower of 
emeralds and rubies in the rays of that great jeweller, 
the sun. Some French savant calls mountains only 
the wrinkles on the face of the old earth, and Parsees 
say that they are the heads of the long pins that hold 
the world down in its place. The road winds along 
like a serpent, hedged in by a rickety fence (wherever 
there is no danger) ; but it always gives way at the 
steepest places, and rolls down into the valley, out of 
deference to the view. In very sharp descents, one 
mule is fastened behind the carriage, on the safe prin- 
ciple that a mule will always pull backwards when he 
gets a chance. The road seems to be built with a view 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 221 

to all the travel setting one way, from Chamounix to 
Martigny. One solitary wagon and a mule, very small 
of its age, came the other way, and found out its 
mistake. It turned out for us, and in the act went 
backward down the hill-side, dragging the mule with 
it. The descent was grassy, but steep, for about a hun- 
dred feet, and ended in a rushing stream full of sharp 
rocks. When I looked over the edge I expected to 
see a mule in pieces ; but about half way down, a pro- 
jecting stone had wedged itself into the wagon and 
held it till it could be secured. The bewildered mule 
was dragged up the bank, and set npon his feet, and 
from the tip of his bruised nose to the end of his tail 
he wore the exact expression of Sterne's famous don- 
key, which seemed to say, " Don't beat me ; but if you 
will you may ! " A mule is almost as hard to kill as a 
woman! The wagon had contained nothing but an 
elderly carpet-bag, and the hill-side was strewn with 
combs, and brushes, and shirts. A few rods farther on, 
and out of sight of the late catastrophe, we came upon 
the owner, sitting on a stone in the broiling sun with 
note-book in hand, and a tall hat on his head, which 
looked as Ibreign to the scene as anything could. Bret 
Harte says that a stove-pipe hat on any one but a 
clergyman or a gambler in the mountains of California 
in the early days would have justified a blow. In this 
man, one recognized the Yankee as distinctly as if the 
American postage-stamp had been on his forehead, and 
his hollow cheeks and well-preserved black suit seemed 
to mark the minister from Cranberry Centre, whom a 
lucky bronchitis had sent abroad for cure. I suppose 
he thought he left his wagon to study the fine view, 



222 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

all unconscious that his guardian angel had put it 
into his head in order to avoid the coming overturn, 
American tourists can never feel quite at home in Al- 
pine scenery, because they miss ''Plantation Bitters" 
and " Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer " in large letters on 
every salient point, as they have them in their native 
wilds. The "effete monarchies" manage these things 
better. As we approach the summit of the pass, the 
plot thickens, and the gloomy mountains draw their 
heads nearer together, like conspirators. 

The Black Head is a stubborn mass of rock that 
leans over the valley with a scowl. It has been tun- 
nelled, since there is no getting around it; and we went 
in at one ear in France and came out at the other in 
Switzerland. In the long, down-hill jolt describing 
an endless row of acute angles, we were in sight of 
Martigny for miles ; but the village seemed to flee be- 
fore us. When w^e reached it we were still alive, but 
in the condition of that army which would be ruined 
by such another victory. 

However, a night's sleep and the breath of the 
mountains miraculously "knit up the ravelled sleeve 
of care," and the better part of us were ready next 
morning to mount into the region of eternal snow, 
where the brethren of Mont St. Bernard slowly freeze 
to death in the service of God and his poor. 

Our mules trotted cheerfully over the splendid road 
built by ISTapoleon, nodding their heads continually as 
if in token of approval of such travelling. The Alpine 
pictures, in their azure frame of sky, unrolling them- 
selves one after another as we climb higher and higher, 
are so many health-giving draughts to our weariness. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 223 

The human figures in the landscape are its only draw- 
back. In the filthy little village, where we stopped for 
luncheon, there is everything to take away one's appe- 
tite. The government seems to be administered by 
pigs that do shamefully tyrannize over the other in- 
habitants. We were forced to drive through a sty, 
long drawn out. St. Peter is doubtless ashamed of his 
namesake. The people were just lumps of animated 
dirt, and yet they might be clean if they thought of 
it ; there is water enough always going to waste down 
the side of the mountain. When we left St. Pierre 
another mule joined company with us, a portentous 
addition, of which we soon found the meaning:. The 
mountain gi 3W so steep that the carriage-road shrunk 
to a foot-path, and leaving the wagon behind, we 
mounted the mules. As we climbed in single file the 
rugged way with a sack of hay strapped on behind, 
and our own modest traps hung on each side like the 
saddle-bags of a doctor in the olden time, we looked 
not unlike an old picture of the "Flight into Egypt." 
There is a chilly flavor of snow in the air long before 
we pass the first patches of it lying on the grass like 
bits of white linen put out to dry. 

When the Hospice comes into sight, after twelve 
hours of climbing, the gaunt old dogs rush out at us 
with a loud welcome, and a troop of beggars creep out 
of their holes in the ground, for they are too filthy 
ever to have had any other home. The dogs are 
weather-beaten old heroes; but these beggars, who 
cumber the earth by the charity of the brethren, are 
so evidently below the level of brutes, that they ought 
to break themselves of the habit of living. 



224 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

We go up the steps of a gray stone building, and 
ring a bell, which brings a brother to the door. A 
pale, handsome man is this monk, with vivacious black 
eyes never tamed by conventual rule or everlasting 
cold. He leads us up stairs, along a stone corridor 
with many wooden doors, numbered and unpainted, 
leading out of it, and leaves us in a little room with 
three narrow beds in it, and as many small wash-hand 
stands. The floor and walls are of unpainted wood ; 
but the beds would rejoice the heart of the neatest 
of Yankee housewives. They are high-posters with 
white canopies and valences, and for coverlet there is 
a fat feather-bed cased in white. As we looked out of 
the little window into the sky, a few flakes of snow 
float lazily downward, and it is only the middle of 
August. In the dining-room a welcome wood-fire 
blazes in the wide grate, a piano stands open, and 
our black-eyed host makes good cheer for us in French, 
which, in its very sound, is more lively than English 
ever can be. It was a fast-day of peculiar strictness 
for the brethren, and we saw no others. The dinner 
was served in this warm room, and we sat down with 
half a dozen other travellers, who had come up from 
the Italian side. There were also three or four mature- 
looking Frenchwomen, who had an undefinable air of 
being at home. It did not appear whether they had 
retired to the Hospice to do penance for their sins, or 
to comfort the lonely brethren with some semblance 
of home life; but there they were. 

A fast-day dinner in a monastery is by no means the 
meagre and starveling afiiiir that one might suppose. 
First came a mild sort of soup, with savory bits of 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 225 

bread in it ; then a course of codfish and potatoes, deli- 
ciously cooked ; then macaroni, with the Italian flavor«5 
then a pyramid of flaky rice rising out of a pond of 
stewed prunes; and the dessert consisted of all man- 
ner of dried fruit and nuts. Red wine flowed freely. 
The brother pressed every dish on his guests with the 
warmest hospitality, and when we left him for the 
night, he urged us to come to mass in the morning at 
five o'clock. How the cold did nip nnd pinch us in 
that little wooden bedroom ! Not the northernmost 
spare chamber in a country house at home, that had 
not been slept in for a score of winters, could equal 
the cruel chill, as with chattering teeth we crept be- 
tween our two feather-beds. We felt ourselves sand- 
wiched in the eternal snows, and the brethren would 
have to send the dogs to our rescue before midnight. 

It could be no worse; but it was scarcely better 
when we crept out again in the small hours of the 
morning and found our way to the chapel. A gor- 
geous mass was going on, and whatever may be th« 
personal privations of the monks of St. Bernard, they 
certainly spare no splendor to the service of God. 
The lace on the priests' robes is as deep as^in any 
cathedral in the land. The black-robed martyrs come 
in slowly, prostrate themselves for a prayer or two, 
and go out again. The ragamufiins, whom we saw 
first, come in too, and are very devout indeed ; but it 
would seem that the doo-s mio^ht understand the ser- 
vice as well as they.. Afterwards we munch the usual 
French breakfast of a roll and a cup of cofl*ee, and, still 
shivering, we go out of doors to look up at the snowy 
peaks that keep watch and ward over the Hospice. 
15 



226 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

A wooden cross marks the dividing line from Italy, 
and we rush with a sudden hot thrill in our veins to 
set our feet on its classic ground. 

" Italia, O Italia, thou that hast the fatal gift of beauty ! " — 

if we never see thee nearer, at least we have touched 
the hem of thy garment ! 

Then the brother takes down a key from the outer 
wall, and with a solemn countenance opens a myste- 
rious door. It is the "Morgue," or home of the dead, 
who have been found frozen on the mountain by the 
dogs. The dry air withers and preserves them in the 
same attitude in which they were found. In the dim, 
vault-like room, shadowy forms lean against the wall, 
w^ith hollow eye-sockets turned towards the door, and 
nearest to us is the body of a mother holding her baby 
on her arm. She is wrapped in a sheet, for when she 
was found she had stripped herself to keep the child 
warm. She is just another verse of that sweet old 
poem of mother-love that will keep on singing itself 
while the world lasts, and cannot be surpassed in mel- 
ody even by the angels. This roomful of the dead is 
kept always the same, that any surviving friends who 
may come in search of them can have the oj^portunity 
to identify them. The thing has come to pass even 
years after death. A haunting horror clings about this 
silent company; but it is so faint and dim in its effect, 
that in five minutes after the door was shut I was 
almost sure that it did not really exist, and I had only 
dreamed it. 

The courtesy of the black-eyed brother clung to us 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, <2.'ll 

to the last; but when we ventured to offer hira money, 
he shrank from it as if it would contaminate him, and 
led us to the little box in the chapel. Here we meek- 
ly dropped in our Napoleons, said the last words in 
broken French, and turned the heads of our mules 
towards Martigny and warm weather. 



228 BEATEN PATHS, OR 



CHAPTER XVI. 



PARIS. 




"There is only one Paris; and out of Paris there is no sal- 
vation for decent people." — " The Baron," in Hyperion. 

OST people bridge the gulf between Geneva and 
Paris by a night journey ; but it is an inhuman 
way of doing penance for one's sins, and must have 
been invented by the great enemy of mankind. The 
surest recipe for making night hideous is to sit through 
the weary houis, ironically called " small," staring in 
the faces of four other unfortunates, distorted by the 
glimmer of a shaking lamp overhead. 

Crossing the Styx is nothing to it. We made the 
journey luxuriously in two days, stopping a night in 
Macon, noted as the birthplace of Lamartine, the 
" literary Don Juan," whose books are to other litera- 
ture hke French kickshaws to solid beef and mutton. 
Lamartine's career would have abundantly glorified a 
short life ; but he had the bad taste to live too long, 
aild to become a sort of poor relation to the French 
government. His chateau in Macon has come down, 
in its old age, to be used for wine cellars and a board- 
ing-school for girls. We literally drove into the pleas- 
ant hotel at Macon in an omnibus, and pulled up in the 



A WOMAN" S VACATION. 229 

court-yard, which is the heart of a French house. All 
its business converges to that centre. It is a French- 
man's castle — he buys a bit of land and builds a house 
all around it. 

Here was first served up to us a flower of Gallic 
cookery, so folded in mystery that we tasted and tasted, 
and could not christen it. We had eaten strange 
compounds before — unaccountable meat and nameless 
vegetables smothered in witch-broth, " thick and slab." 
Only to taste of them was a triumph of faith ; but this 
dainty dish was a delicious riddle without an answer. 
Halves of large tomatoes, with the contents scooped 
out, served for baking dishes ; these were filled with 
mystery, chopped fine and browned over. The beauty 
of it was, that it never tasted twice alike. It was oys- 
ters, chicken, sweet herbs, eggs, cheese, bread-crumbs, 
pickles, sardines, lemons — "everything by turns, and 
nothino: Ions:." 

The French country, as we saw it, was flat and fer- 
tile, commonplace and restful, after the extravagances 
of Swiss scenery. Was it Talleyrand who said no one 
w^ould appreciate the comfort of marrying a ^^ stupid'''' 
unless he had associated with intellectual women all 
his days ? 

It is on this principle that the dull rows of poplar 
trees ,that serve in the place of fences find favor in our 
eyes, though, looked at merely as a tree, it is a ve^e- 
table fiiilure. -A Lombardy poplar is just a wood-cut 
of an elderly spinster of the scrawny type^ holding up 
her skirts, and picking her way over the puddles in a 
wet day — a tree nipped in the bud, reluctant to give 
shade, like a character frozen by early neglect. If 



230 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

men had invented trees, their first attempt must have 
looked Uke a poplar. 

On French railways travellers are treated like express 
packages, "to be kept this side up with care;" but 
nothing is left to their discretion. They are fastened 
into pens till the train is ready, and any question about 
the journey is received by an official with ranch the 
same expression that must have come over Balaam's 
face when his ass spoke to him. 

On French soil, except in the matter of shopping, 
one does not need more than half his wits — there is 
such a surplus among the natives. 

On the frontier our passports were demanded for the 
first time. The train was. remorselessly emptied, even 
to hand-bags and shawl-straps, and the whole herd 
passed through a strait gate, under the eyes of four 
men in cocked hats, to the baggage-room. The first 
comers had their passports examined and compared 
with their faces ; but custom-house officers are mortal, 
after all, and having verified a score or two of "me- 
dium " noses and chins, they relaxed their severity, and 
passed without a word the shrinking rear-guard, who 
had no passports at all. Three or four dingy trunks, 
belonging to a distracted little German milliner, were 
opened, and found to be nearly or quite empty ; but not 
Ab aham himself, when he tried to pass his beautiful 
Sarah in a w^ooden chest through the Egyptian custom- 
house, could have made more fuss about it. The moral 
of travelling with empty cofiTers seemed to be that tak- 
ing full trunks to Paris would be like carrying coals to 
Newcastle. We had been travelling to this point 
with a solid old German coujDle, and my last sight of 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 231 

them makes the frontispiece to all my Germnn memo- 
ries: she carried four leather bags, and he carried — 
his cane. 

*' This is the patient, gentle, unprovoked, 
And unprovoking, never-answering she." 

The first impression of Paris, as one leaves the train 
in the great depot, is that the whole city is hehl in the 
hollow of a powerful hand, that would regulate even 
its breathing. The clieerful and distracting bustle of 
our home railway stations, where nobody has any riglits 
except hackraen, is replaced by an orderly stillness, de- 
pressing to a traveller who has braced himself for a 
hand-to-hand fight over his baggage, and is at least 
sure of one who is glad to see liim. Every cabman is 
seated on his vehicle, as in a funereal cortege. Not 
one can stir until the chief of the omnibuses lias had 
the first chance. The baggage is handed out slowly 
and carefully — you give your word of honor that it 
contains neither tobacco nor spirits — a man in uni- 
form makes a cross on it — and the omnibus driver, 
selected by the chief, takes possession of it and its 
owner. It is so painfully systematic, that' one feels like 
a convict going to prison. This effect is not lessened 
on arriving at a hotel, when little blanks are handed in 
by the police to be filled up with one's name, birth- 
place, last stopi^ing-place, and occupation. The last 
item was a little diflicult to define: one of us was a 
teacher; all the rest were time-killers, and nothing more. 

London is like a collection of towns, one over against 
another — it may be studied and absorbed in pieces; 
but Paris is one and indivisible, not to bo learned in a 



232 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

lifetime. One can only describe little tags and edges 
of it; and that is why all the world comes, and comes 
again, to look at the beauty of its sphinx-like face, and 
make another guess at its meaning. There must be 
great poverty, and suflfering, and crime in Paris ; but 
they do not float on the surface so brazenly as in Lon- 
don. Louis Napoleon has made misery half ashamed 
of itself in his broad, white streets, where Parisians 
can no longer throw up a barricade of paving-stones 
and fight out a campaign in a night. There is no old 
dirt or dim relii^ious lisjht anvwhere. The sidewalks 
are often thirty feet wide, and one never sees a crowd 
so dense as in the American cities, where the sidewalk 
looks, afar off, like a moving hank of many-shaded and 
brio-ht-colored worsted. 

The Bonaparte dynasty has wrought a great "N" 
into so many stony places, and hung it with such 
delicate sculptures, that, for the sake of what goes 
with it, even a Bourbon would hesitate to erase it. 
The outrages of the Communists are like so many 
gaping wounds in a fair body. The broken walls of 
the Hotel de Ville wnll scarcely rise up before the 
Parisian crater belches fire again. This was Lamar- 
tine's battle-ground — for three days he stood on a 
balcony of the Hotel de Ville, and threw down little 
sops of oratory to appease the raging Cerberus of the 
mob that filled the court-yard. When a savage cry 
for his head reached him, he said he wished that every 
one of them had his head on their shoulders, which 
moved the crowd to a grim mirth and dispersed it. 
The hungriest French stomach can always be staid 
with a bou mot. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 283 

The Column Vendorae, twined with Napoleon's vic^ 
tories, and crowned with Ins statue, broke into four 
pieces when it fell. It is to be set up again, and the 
cracks smoothed qver, till another Commune lays it 
low. Napoleon's son, who came so gorgeously into the 
world, and went so lamely out of it, wrote in the 
album of a French count about returning to Paris, 
"Tell the Column Yendome that I die because I can 
never see it!" The French lay all defects in their 
present state at the door of the Commune, as islanders 
in the tropics attribute everything that goes wrong to 
the last hurricane. 

On every public building is written up, in large let- 
ters, the favorite cry of the mob, " Liberty, Equality, 
and Fraternity," as if it were possible for either of 
these three things to be realized in France. This was 
done in Louis Phillipe's time to ward off the desecrat- 
ing fury of the mob. They should have written — 

"A change — my kingdom for a change ! " 

or, better still, the favorite maxim of Jonathan Wild, 
"Never to do any more mischief than was necessary 
to the effecting his j^urpose, for that mischief was too 
l^recious to be thrown away." 

Part of the brightness of Paris streets radiates from 
the white ruffled caps of the women, who seem to have 
most of the business of the city on their minds. 

The French type of face is much more like the 
American than any other — they look equally keen- 
eyed, alert, and quick-witted. I constantly mistook 
one for the other. Market women in white frilled caps 



234 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

look up with the same set of features that one may see 
on New England doorsteps in the twilight — sharp-cut 
laces with early wrinkles, and not an ounce of flesh to 
spare. It confirms the theory that Nature makes faces 
by the dozen, in the same mould, and just scatters them 
broadcast without distinction of nation. There is an- 
other reason, however, for the pervading American 
tinge in Paris streets. There is a permanent j)opula- 
tion of twenty thousand Americans ; and in September 
all those wdio have been summering in Europe come 
back to Paris for more last words, and to spend all the 
dollars they have left. In this September, Paris gave 
wet welcome to her devotees. It rained every day 
for three \veeks, with a chilling wind worse than east, 
which made furs comfortable, and brought a golden 
crop to cabmen. Boston, in its most abandoned 
month, was never guilty of such a "spell of weather." 

Speaking of cabmen, their tariflf is sternly fixed for 
them by law; but they creep out of it by asking for a 
morsel of drink-money, which you must pay or hear a 
volley of "sacr-r-r-s" rolling after you like big stones. 
After one of them had pulled his horse up from a fall, 
he got down from his seat and kissed him on the nose — 
a touching little attention to the animal's feelings, which 
should be added to the regulations of the "Society for 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." 

The great stones on the bridges and edges of the 
Seine are numbered in starins: fiq-ures. I could not 
learn for what reason; but they must be convenient 
for making appointments. Servant girls who live in 
families where no followers are allowed, probably meet 
them at such a number on the river bank. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION-. 235 

The shops are scarcely as brilliant as in the large 
American cities; but they are derlicated poetically to 
"spring-time," or to "a coquette," or to "thoughts," 
with a pansy for a trade-mark on their cards. One 
shop, for selling only velvet cloaks, is dedicated to 
'•the Child Jesus." Americans are received in French 
shops as to their mothers' arms. Nothing is too good 
for them, and nothing can equal the price they are 
expected to pay. After the lofty indifference of home 
shopmen, the obsequiousness of French clerks seems 
almost ironical. The perfunied essence of all Parisian 
shopping is in the Palais Royal, where one finds the 
luxuries of life in profusion, and cares no longer for its 
necessaries — real jewels, such as the Shah of Persia 
lately bought for himself, and mock jewels, such as he 
bought for his waves — precious boxes in silver, porce- 
lain, and Russia leather, for holding things still more 
precious — china, rare without being ugly, for it is only 
in England that ugliness biings a high price. It was 
once the palace of Louis XIII., and ornaments, such as 
now lie on satin in the shop windows, then shone on 
the white bosoms of beautiful women; 

Ninon de I'Enclos lived near it — the woman who 
came nearest to discovering the elixir of youth since 
Time forgot her — and she lived to fascinate three 
generations of Frenchmen, father, son, and grandson, 
in turn. It seems to me she must have beorun to fade 
from the moment that her unconscious son made love 
to her, and, when she broke the truth to him, fled into 
the gnrden and killed himself. 

Not fjir off lived Madame de Sevigne, w^hose love 
letters to her daughter were so daintily affectionate, so 



236 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

whipped into the cream of worship, that one would 
have thous^ht mother-h)ve a new thins; under the sun. 
These letters are full of history seen through feminine 
and aristocratic prejudices, which do somewhat turn it 
inside out; but it is the rare devotion of one woman 
to another that "makes one love the very ink that 
wrote them." 

If the Evil One had a second Eve to tempt in these 
latter days, he would no longer climb a tree and hold 
out a paltry apple ; but he would gently lead her round 
the Palais Royal, secure that if her principles had a 
price they would find it there. 

We drove one day through the "Rue Adam." "I 
wonder," said Juno, " if there is a ' Rue Eve.' " « No," 
said St. Ursula. " "We ail rue Eve bitterly enough, 
without posting it on a street corner." The "Rue 4®™® 
Seplembre " suggests a bright idea to street namers, 
as there are three hundred and sixty-five days in the 
year to choose from. 

French housekeeping is easy as breathing, compared 
with the hard work we make of it. One gives a little 
party, or the party makes itself, and the "entertain- 
ment," as some people oddly call the supper, consists 
of a bit of cake, and a cup of tea, and a glass of wine, 
and everybody is satisfied. In America, the four quar- 
ters of the globe must be ransacked to furnish forth 
the feast. In the city a caterer takes possession of 
one's hou§e like a pillaging army ; and in the country, 
if a lady can give one large party a year, and live 
through it, it is all that her friends expect of her. "I 
could not endure the slavery of housekeeping in Bos- 
ton," said a lady, who had revisited her old home after 
nine years in Paris. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 237 

It is no wonder that French matrons can talk well — 
then' thoughts are not stretched on a gridiron worse 
than St. Lawrence's. In the old English country- 
houses, a passage-way often led from the family pew 
in the chapel into the kitchen, so that the lady of the 
manor, between her prayers, might see that the game 
was roasted to a turn. How can an American house- 
wife, with three or four Irish heathen in her kitchen, 
sit with hands crossed on a satin lap and discourse 
calmly of "predestination and foreknowledge abso- 
lute," after tlie French fashion, in the last critical 
half-hour before a dinner party? "The gravy alone 
is enough to add twenty years to one's age, I do assure 
you." iVnierican women do the thing every day, but 
it fades and bleaches them before their time. No 
French family makes its own bread ; the bakers do it 
for them, and do it Avell. Tall narrow loaves, nearly a 
yard long, stand about in corners like so many umbrel- 
las ; and you meet men going about with round loaves, 
having a hole in the middle, strmig the whole length 
of their arms, and if any mother-earth cleave to the 
bread from the coat-sleeve, so much the worse for the 
eater thereof; it is apparently no concern of the buyer 
or seller. The first meal of the day is a roll and a cup 
of coffee taken in one's chamber, and the real break- 
fast of meat and eggs waits till noon. Americans 
must always associate with French mornings a terrible 
feeling of goneness. A very little food goes a great 
way in a French dinner; but it is truly gluttonous in 
clean plates. The interstices are expected to be filled 
up with bread. It is always the same tune with varia- 
tions. First a colored and flavored water called soup — • 



238 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

this implies a great deal of bread; then "a portion" 
of fish, then a dish of gravy with inscrutable contents, 
then a lonely vegetable, like cauliflower or beans. 
This habit of serving one insignificant weed (often it 
is artichokes) with a flourish of clean jjlates, and noth- 
ing for a background, was to me a perpetual anti- 
climax — "in the name of the Prophet — figs!" After 
this sustaining morsel comes the great gun of the din- 
ner, slices of meat or fowl with lettuce. Afterwards 
there is nothing worth mentioning. Compared with 
our custom, the French dessert should be spelled with 
one s. 

A bird of passage in Paris must see so many things 
that there is no time left to study the people. One 
cannot verify at a glance the tradition of giace and 
exquisite manner which have been the birthright of 
French women through all time. At this time there 
was a comedy phiying in a Paris theatre showing up 
the free manners of American society, in one scene of 
which a young lady at a party rushes up to a man 
and kisses him at first sight; but there was in our 
hotel a young couple that might have gone bodily on 
to our stage as French caricatures, without altering a 
thread about them. Monsieur X. had a hair-dresser 
attend him daily, and his chief occupation was gently 
manipulating liis Hyacinthine locks with an exquisitely- 
kept white hand, as one sees actresses express their 
feelings and settle their wigs at the same time; but 
Madame X.! she might have been set up in a milli- 
ner's window for a wax figure, and no one would ever 
have discovered the mistake. She was to her fellow- 
boarders like a bird of paradise among brown wrens. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 239 

She Lad oiange-colored hair (so intense in color that 
pea-green or sky-blue would have been equally natural) 
laid up on her head in loose puffs that looked as if 
each one had been made separately, and stuck in its 
right place. In shady nooks behind her ears, this 
resplendent color changed to a dull brown, which was 
doubtless its first estate. She rouged her cheeks and 
tinted her lips, pencilled her eyebrows, and darkened 
the lids, made her veins blue with "azurene," and 
whited the whole sepulchre with pearl-powder. If she 
could have lived and died by gas-light, she would never 
have lost her beauty; but the garish and impertinent 
morning sun would show where one color left off and 
another began. 

After a toilet of four solid hours, she came to a little 
soiree, robed in three or four shades of purple silk 
relieved with white satin, and we held our breath to 
look at her; but she would have been very unsafe to 
kiss. She danced laboriously, like most foreigners 
swinging her skirts high from the floor, and her part- 
ner mopped his face, after it was over, as if he had 
been in a hay-field in midsummer. 

The Americans on the same floor danced so sub- 
duedly to the same music, that they seemed to be doing 
an entirely different thing. When a Frenchman dances 
with a young girl, he is expected not to exchange a 
word with her from the moment that he takes her from 
her chaperon's side till he brings her back again. 
Monsieur X. went away for a week's hunting, leaving 
two thick books for his wife's reading, with the injunc- 
tion not to leave her room unnecessarily. Iler con- 
jugal rendering of thiis command was to practise an 



240 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

affectionate little comedy with a handsome young jour- 
nali.st, who had frequented tlie house for some lime 
under cover of visitinsr a sick aunt — never was aunt 
fso tended before ! At this very time, Madame X. was 
shocked and horrified by an American girl sitting on a 
sofa with a young man whom she had known from 
childhood, and who brought news of her family. Mon- 
sieur X. came home a day before his time, as men all 
over the world have an uncomfortable habit of doing, 
and brought her iniquity to light. He sent for his 
hair-dresser immediately; but I know not what was 
her penance- One could not help wondering if these 
two artificial people, being reduced to their lowest 
terms, would recognize each other. The lady could 
not have been more than twenty-two. Time, the 
avenger, had scarcely laid a finger on her; but a 
woman of seventy could not have labored harder to 
hide his ravages. If such things are done in the green 
tree, what will be done in the dry? But to know all 
French women by these presents, is as unjust as to 
judge all American women by those who lecture on 
Woman's Rights. They have no beauty that one 
should desire them; but Madame X. was a work of 
art whose shades and perspective I was never tired of 
studying. 

The Paris houses are high and spacious. Everything 
is on a grand scale, exeept the bowls and pitchers in 
the bedrooms. These aie mere cups and saucers, com- 
|)ared with English ones. Travelling Frenchmen are 
always surprised at the profuse arrangements for bath- 
ing among Anglo-Saxons. M. Taine wondered over 
the waste of towels in English country-houses, as a pig 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 241 

might turn up its eyes at seeing a cat wash her face, or 
a sober-minded hen contemn the frequent ablutions of 
a duck. Living in Paris is not so preternaturally cheap 
as one commonly supposes. One may hire a modest 
flat of perhaps six small rooms for about sixty dollars 
a month, and one may be barely comfortable in a hotel 
for two dollars a day. French reception rooms have 
their sofas often in the middle of the room, which 
gives a cosy, talkative air to thera even when emptyi 
The shining waxed floors are much cleaner than woollen 
Carpets; but the perpetual clicking of boot-heels and 
the necessity of taking perpetual heed to one's steps, 
as if every floor was a pond frozen over, condemn 
them. The servants polish these floors with brushes 
fastened to their feet. 

The favorite night for French parties is Saturday, 
that they may make Sunday a day of rest, according 
to the commandment. A good Catholic sees no harm 
in dancing in the sacred hours, and scorns the scruples 
of over-strict Protestants, as David scorned the pru-^ 
dishness of Michal, daughter of Saul, when she reproved 
him for dancing before the ark. The races begin on 
the first Sunday in September, and divide Catholics 
and heretics like sheep from the goats. All the pleas- 
ures of life are crowded into a French Sunday. The 
Fourth of July is a fast-day to it. The shops are 
nearly all open, and if one is closed, the notice is pat 
up in large letters, as who should say, "I am more 
righteous than my neighbors." 

Parisians who shut up their shops on Sunday bear 
the same relation to their fellow-sinners that we, who 
go to church three times, besides Sunday school, do to 
16 



242 ^BEATEN PATHS, OR 

those who believe in one sermon a day and a drive in 
the afternoon. An American minister went to call on 
a French brother "of the cloth" on a Sunday evening, 
and after talking about the state of the church, the 
Frenchman proposed a season of prayer, to which the 
other readily acceded; but in the midst of it he 
jumped up and excused himself, as he had forgotten 
an appointment with a lady to go to the opera on that 
eveninoj. * 

Our first Sunday in Paris was a very pious one, if 
going to church often be a proof of it. We went first 
to Notre Dame, where all the French grandeur that 
required a mixture of religion has been consummated. 
My choice of all its pageants would have been the 
coronation of Josephine' — there was "richness;" and 
yet Madame Junot tells us that Napoleon found time 
to observe lier black velvet dress and tell her it was 
too sombre for the occasion. His own crimson robe, 
studded with golden bees, is still kept among the 
treasures of the church. Notre Dame lacks the dim, 
shadowy beauty of the German cathedrals. It is so 
light, and white, and cheerful, that nobody doubts for 
a moment that it was built by men and Frenchmen, 
There is no loneliness so complete as that of a heretic 
in a Catholic church. The glory of its bigness brings 
reverence, and the organ floats the thoughts upward 
on great waves of sound. One cannot follow the un- 
familiar service, and one goes easily out of the body 
into the region of day-dreams — the clear voice of a 
child-chorister, rising like a flute above a whole orches- 
tra, mingles wdth them — priests moving to and fro do 
not disturb them; day-dreams in which old mistakes 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 213 

right themselves, and lost friends come to life again — 
the spell remains when the music ceases, but it vanishes 
as we go down the aisle and see an old man holding 
out to us a brush, precisely like the paste-brush used 
by paperers. It is wet in holy water, and every Catho- 
lic touches it with a gloved finger and makes the sign 
of the cross. I think I never stumbled so suddenly 
down the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. 

I^otre Dame blossomed into a rare flower garden, 
with walls carpeted with Gobelin tapestry, when the 
young prince, Eugenie's son, was christened. 

" It was not half so fine then as it wall be when he 
comes to his own again," muttered the guide. " When 
will that be?" asked St. Ursula, as if the day were 
already set ; and the answer is the universal shrug of 
the shoulders, which never could have been invented 
in a free country. It needed an iron despotism to pro- 
duce something which should mean more than speech, 
and yet never be told again, and the French shrug is 
the result; -the Bastile and the guillotine were its god- 
fathers. Americans will never import it, because th-ey 
have no use for it. 

In the red-hot time of the Commune, much vitriol 
and kerosene were set apart for the destruction of 
Notre Dame; but the saints preserved it. Perhaps St. 
Denis, who is believed by the pious to have walked 
through the streets of Paris w^ith his head under his 
arm, had an eye to it, or sweet St. Genevieve, w^ho 
began life as a little shepherdess on the hills, and grew 
into such faith that she prayed away the heathen 
H.uns, wlio were coming to sack the city; but these 
were lambs compared with the wolfish Communists. 



244 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

St. Genevieve takes care of Paiis, and has her hands 
fall; but the patron saint of all France is Clotilde, 
wife of Clovis, who converted her husband and all his 
subjects to Christianity through great tribulation, and a 
very bellicose kind of a Christian he was, after all. 
When the touching story of the crucifixion was read 
to him, he grasped his sword and cried out, "If I had 
only been there with my brave Franks, I would have 
killed all those wicked Jews! " The French reli<j:ion 
must have a deal of killing in it, to make the nation 
happy. 

The church of the "Madeleine," where Father Hya- 
cinthe preached before he was cast out, is built like a 
Greek temple. The beautiful altar-piece of white mar- 
ble, and the purity of the whole interior, scarcely fitted 
the gaudy pomp of the high mass that was going on 
when we entered. It was the feast of the Virgin, and 
a group of women, veiled in white from head to foot, 
made part of the procession that followed the "Host" 
down the aisle. The priests about the altar kicked out 
their scarlet trains, as I have seen rural brides do as 
they posed themselves for marriage with their backs 
to the company. The audience was exceedingly well 
dressed, and we remained seated, like obstinate heretics 
as we were, studying the latest style in bonnets, until 
an old lady near us, who shook with palsy so that she 
could scarcely hold her prayer-book, spoke to the sex- 
ton about us; and after that we rose and fell with the 
crowd. It was a bit of the old delusion that Catholics 
have bought the only road to heaven and fenced it in. 
Every one of them would be a persecutor, if he could ; 
even the palsy could not shake that spirit out of them; 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 245 

anrl yet the Catholic church is a motherly refuge to its 
children, working hard to save them against their will, 
comforting their souls with absolution, and putting a 
stone on their heads that they may never grow to be 
anything but children. "It would be one of the most 
perfect engines ever put together," snys Hawthorne, 
"if it only had angels to run it." 

From the Madeleine we strayed into the church of 
St. Augustine, so bright and gny in its pictures that it 
would serve for a lady's sitting-room. There a hand- 
some young piiest was going through with the weary 
ceremony of a christening with salt and oil, and all 
that nonsense, which any right-minded baby will scorn 
as it deserves. This one roared as if it had herelio 
blood in its veins, and would not uphold the papacy 
on any terms. 

Afterwards, in a long vagabond walk, we came upon 
the Pantheon, once a church, and then dedicated to 
the great men of France after the nation had voted 
God out of their councils. In the dome-pictures, the 
artist has represented Glory, and Patriotism, and Death, 
and other intimate friends of Napoleon, in the guise 
of handsome and dishevelled women ; but he needed 
to add no touch of, beauty to the figure of Napoleon 
in his youth that he did not already possess. By way 
of mitigating the extreme grandeur of the interior, the 
altar screen is made of painted and gilded j^aper, like 
the side scene of a theatre. Theft we wandered into 
the old-fnshioned gardens of the Luxembourg palace — 
eighty-five acres of flowers, and fountains, and statues, 
where whole families take their lunch and their sewing, 
and s|)end Sunday out of doors. Of the men, some 



246 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

are playing ball, or cards, or diinkiDg at little tables, 
while the band plays by the hour. Many of the chil- 
dren were handsome, with eyes that looked as if they 
had been deepened about the edges with India ink. 
It is the southern sun that tints them. They are rare- 
ly seen among Anglo-Saxons. I never heard a French 
child cry; but life cannot be all gardens to them. 

The palace has been changed to a gallery of modern 
French art. I don't think I ever could have realized 
what an intolerable old hag Queen Elizabeth was, if I 
had not seen De La Roche's picture of her death in 
one of those three thousand rich dresses that made her 
wardrobe. Rosa Bonheur's "Ploughing with Oxen" 
was so rarely natural,- that one could almost smell the 
balmy breath of the soft-eyed brutes. Another was a 
" Beggar Girl," with such real tears dropping down her 
cheek, that, hung in a sitting-room, it would shortly 
bring a whole family to green and yellow melancholy. 
Why will '^eo\A(i paint tragedies when we can haidly 
keep up with the real thing that is always going on ? 
Another solemnity in oils is Count Eberhard weeping 
over his dead son. In the thirty years' war, when he 
was pressing on to conquest, he saw his son suddenly 
struck down, and the. soldiers paused; but he urged 
them on, saying that duty came before grief. When 
the battle was over, they found him weeping, as in the 
picture. The father has a wonderfully noble face, and 
the son is very dead indeed. In the hall of statuary 
the air grows suddenly pure and cold, like marble. 
Here is a young girl whispering her first secret into 
the ear of a statue of Venus; another has just lifted a 
smiling mask from her sad fice ; all young girls might 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. ' 247 

do that sooner or later in their lives. The everlasting 
" Mother of the Gracchi " is here too, with her boys ; 
and the sculptor has given to one of them the head 
of the young Augustus, which was quite unnecessary, 
since a mother's pride does not depend on the quality 
of her children ; they are always her jewels, though 
paste to everybody else. 

The Luxembourg has been the scene of many old 
French attempts to invent a new sin. "Brave men 
and fair women "played deep for money and honor 
within its walls. They dug some of. the first trenches 
of the Revolution \ but the palace has taken to virtue 
in its old age, and looks down peacefully enough on 
crowds of nurses and children, who have taken the 
place of gentlemen in powdered wigs and ladies in 
long trains. 

The Parisians pursue pleasure with an infinite zest ; 
but I doubt if they really clasp it, because pleasure is 
never the garment of life, but only the fringe that trims 
it, so narrow with some, so broad with others. To 
seek pleasure only is like walking up to a bed of migno- 
nette, with malice aforethought, to take in all the 
perfume in one great sniff: it is- always a disappoint- 
ment; but come upon it unawares, and a little bieeze 
brings one a great wave of fragrance, that makes the 
senses reel in a sweet drunkenness. 

Parisians live in a crowd all their days, and are 
buried in a crowd at last. "Pere La Chaise" is a city 
of the dead that needs a Louis Napoleon to widen its 
narrow streets. Avenues of little shops full of coffins 
and funeral wreaths make guide-boards to it long be- 
fore we see the gate. Each family has a little tomb, 



248 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

about six feet by eight, in the shape of a miniature 
temple, which is more or less ornamented with statues 
and artificial flowers. The coffins are let down through 
the floor, one above another, the lowest one in time 
giving way, so that it is never full. The French econ- 
omize every inch of space, after death as well as before. 
Many of these vaults are sold only for ten years — 
quite time enough to forget anybody, according to 
French ideas. Some are filled with wreaths of yellow 
"immortelles," brought there on biithdays by friends. 

We had been looking all day for lodgings in a French 
family for the winter, and we gladly sat down to rest 
on the step of a tomb, while St. Ursula went in search 
of a guide. She was gone long enough to buy one for 
life. "Do you suppose," said Juno, "that she can be 
looking for apartments here? We want them very 
quiet, you know, and where the inhabitants, would 
speak no English." She appeared at last with a guide, 
so small and withered, that she ought in conscience to 
have got him at half price. 

In the Jewish quarter we found the tomb of Ra- 
chel, queen of the French stage, scribbled all over 
with names of foreign visitors. No such bad taste 
springs out of French soil. Perhaps Rachel's acting 
has never been so well translated into words as in 
Charlotte Bronte's Yillette, under the name of " Yash- 
ti." The Rothschilds have a tomb as plain as any 
Israelite of them all. French epitaphs are often quaint 
in their simplicity. "To a lady of a noble heart." 
"Here lies the good mother of a family." "I think," 
said St. Ursuln, "that I would rather be the mother 
of a good family." Marshal Ney has a little enclOsm'e 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 249 

in an iron fence by himself, as in our home burial- 
places, and his only monument is a mound of scarlet 
geraniums, as if his generous blood had colored them. 
He was made of the fine clay set apnrt for heroes; but 
he had " a strong temptation to do bravely ill," and he 
yielded to it. In the Russian campaign, which Talley- 
rand called "the beginning of the end," he would 
charge a legion at the head of four men as readily 
as if he had an army at his back. He promised to 
bring Napoleon to the Bourbons in a cage, but at the 
last moment packed his old uniform to take with him, 
and went over to his old friend at sight. The pride 
or the shame of his family give him a nameless grave. 

Moliere and La Fontaine lie side by side. The lat- 
ter has a fox on his tomb, and the former should have 
an old woman, since he kept one, while alive, to criticise 
his poetry. La Fontaine's oddity would have made 
him famous without his fables. He met a young man 
in society with whom he was much pleased, and being 
told that it was his son, he coolly replied, " I am glad 
of it — I like him." 

The story of Madame Lavalette is told in bas-relief, 
on her monument. She saved her husband's life by 
changing clothes with him, and remaining in prison in 
his place. If there is a spot in Pcre La Chaise which 
may be called cheerful, it is the region set apart for 
the poor. They lie close together under little wooden 
crosses and a coverlet of wreaths; but they have only 
a three years' lease of even these close quarters. After- 
wards theii- bones are mingled together in pits digged 
for the purpose. 

Abelard and Heloise lie side by side in stony and 



250 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

mildewed state under a canopy. They " gave all for 
love, and thought the world well lost." There is noth- 
ing like true love for embalming a story; heroes and 
martyrs have no such chance with posterity as your 
faithful lover. Ileloise had beauty and intellect, a 
strong mind and a weak heart, and between the two, 
her teacher, Abelard, brought hel* to grief. They were 
both forced into convents, one by her relatives, and the 
other by contumely; but they loved to the last. In 
Abelard's lonely convent by the sea, he fought with his 
hunting and carousing monks, who retorted on him his 
own sins, and would have poisoned him in the commu- 
nion wine. From under his abbot's cowl, he groans to 
a friend of his youth, "I have not yet triumphed over 
that unhappy passion. In the midst of my retirement 
I sigh, I weep, I pine, I speak the dear name Heloise, 
and am pleased ^vith the sound." 

The peculiarity of this sad love story is, that the 
great retribution fell on the man. No woman need be 
utterly wretched, if she knows that her lover is faithful 
unto death. She may keep her heart up under any 
cross but another woman. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, 251 



CHAPTER XVIL 



PARIS. 



" The nooks and corners of great cities have a double popula- 
tion of inhabitants and recollections." 

N "Dame Eiiropa's School," the French boy, Louis, 
had the finest playhouse of all, and the German 
Fritz casts envious eyes upon it. 

Paris, in these republican days, is like a grand prop- 
erty in which the owner has just died, leaving no chil- 
dren, and the estate is not yet settled; every one is 
waiting for the coming of the heir. The president's 
pi'oclamations have a deprecatory strain, as who should 
say, " We will try to hold things together till some- 
thing turns up." 

A republic in France resembles Marie Antoinette 
playing milkmaid ; the imperial tricks and manners will 
crop out in spite of the disguise. The nation began lu 
barbarous magnificence, when its 'earliest kings were 
waited upon at table, on their coronation feast, by their 
nobles on horseback, and it can never break itself of 
royal habits. 

One of these is the manufacture of Gobelin tapes- 
try, used only for French palaces, and for presents to 
princes. It keeps right on, while Paris amuses itself 



252 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

with democracy, and will have some gay trappings 
ready for the heir when he comes. 

It has arrived at such perfection, that its woollen 
pictures are richer and softer than any painting in oils. 

The carpets do not differ much from so-called velvet 
ones, except that their pile is thicker. The workmen 
sit in a row before the web, putting in loops with hun- 
dreds of little shuttles, wound with different shades of 
yarn; the painted pattern unrolls above their heads as 
they need it. As it is all done by hand, a carpet is 
often the work of five or ten years. 

Very common looking men do this work, but it is 
only a talented artist who. can deal with the tapestry; 
they sit behind their work as the Fates sit behind our 
lives, and their pattern, painted in oils, is behind them. 
In one of these yarn-pictures, a splendid woman pick- 
ing oranges from a tree, was so life-like, that the rounded 
arm looked as if one could pinch it. Their portraits are 
absolutely perfect; and when one thinks that a ievi^ 
stitches, with their wooden needles, too far to right or 
left, would spoil a whole face, it appears how entirely 
the beauty of the work depends on the skill of the 
artist, and not at all on the material. A single piece 
has been valued at thirty thousand dollars, but it can 
often be bought second, or forty-second, hand, more or 
less old and faded. In the early days of its manufac- 
ture, it was woven in little pieces and sewed together; 
the noses and chins were often a miraculous fit. 

On the way home, we wandered into the ancient 
enclosure of the University of Sorbonne, whose doc- 
tors used to take in all the old European tangles to be 
straightened out. The respondents came into court at 



A WOMAJV'S VACATION. 253 

six in the morning, and remained until six at night, 
without partaking of food : the arguments must have 
waxed personal in the last hour or two. The divorce 
of Henry VIII. from Catharine of Arragon, and his 
marriage with Anne Boleyn, were sat upon for many 
days ; the doctors disagreed, but the royal Mormon 
soon settled it for himself. When they had nothing 
else to do, they sharpened their wits on such whet- 
stones as these : How many angels could dance on the 
point of a fine needle? or, Can an angel go from one 
point to another without j^assing over the intermediate 
space ? 

The heart of Paris is the Place de la Concorde — 
it has had many names, and Place de la Discorde would 
have suited it best of all. Once an equestrian statue 
of Louis XV. adorned it, with figures of Justice, Pru- 
dence, &c., at the base, which provoked the bon mot 
that all the virtues were trampled under foot by Vice on 
horseback. Afterwards the guillotine was set up on the 
same spot, and three thousand innocent heads rolled 
on the ground, because the sins of the fathers had 
oome down to the third and fourth generation. The 
French Revolution was nobly born ; it had for its ances- 
tors the finest aspirations of human nature, and it made 
itself respected till it meddled with women ; then all 
the world turned against it. 

Every male head in France might have been in dan- 
ger, without much foreign outcry, if they had let the 
mothers alone; but when they shot the white limbs of 
the Princess Lamballe out of a gun, and gave a woman 
her father's blood to drink, before they shed her own, 
human nature got under arms. 



254 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

Looking at it from "the royal point of view, and re- 
flecting on the inconvenience of losing one's head in 
the prime of life, the taking off of Louis XVI. and 
Marie Antoinette appears the concentrated essence of 
all brutality ; but when one considers their loose ways 
of wasting money on their pleasures, knowing that the 
nation was bankrupt, and the people starving, it would 
seem that cutting them into inch pieces, or roasting 
them at a slow fire, would scarcely meet their deserts. 
They were buried without a prayer; but when their 
sorrowful daughter came back with the other Bourbons, 
she was comforted by seeing an "Expiatory Chapel" 
built over their bones, where mass is performed every 
day, so that at last they have funeral enough to atone 
for the temporary loss. 

The guillotine has been replaced by an Egyptian 
obelisk, brought from Luxor at an immense cost; the 
mate to it was given, by the Pacha of Egypt, to the 
English government, but it still guards the tomb of 
Rameses. The English have too many royal children 
to portion off to afford obelisks. 

Two generous fountains spout water all day on the 
old blood-stains, and the statues of eight cities of 
France keep guard about the square. 

Strasbourg sits there still, though she has gone over 
to Germany. 

" I suppose that name will be crossed out," I said to 
a Frenchman, as we passed it. 

" No, madam, we shall take it again. Strasbourg has 
only gone on a visit. Her home is in France." 

Frenchmen will never forget how to fight while they 
can go to mass on a Sunday noon in the Hotel des In 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 255 

valides — N^apoleon's home for old soldiers. The service 
is nearly all music — so grand and inspiriting that it 
would make a war-horse paw the ground. The old sol- 
diers, gray-haired in honor and wounds, come stumping 
m, and little di-ummer-bOys take the place of choristers ; 
tattered flags taken in battle hang from the roof, though 
the original flags taken in the first victories of Napo- 
leon were needlessly burned by his brother Joseph, 
when he heard of his flight fiom Waterloo. Beyond 
the church, and under the gilded dome, lies the tomb 
of Napoleon, — another expiatory chapel, this time for 
English outrage. It may be that his spirit has rest on 
the banks of the Seine, where his ashes may mingle 
with that of his old lovers. 

Of all men who ever lived, he was, perhaps, the most 
beloved of his own sex. Leaning over his tomb, one 
wishes, more thnn ever, that the battle of Waterloo 
had gone the other way. If only Grouchy had come 
up instead of Bliicher! But there is no stumbling- 
block like an if; the world is more crowded with ifs 
than with people. Pr.scal hit upon an odd one — "If 
Cleopatra's nose had been half an inch shorter, it would 
have changed the histoiy of the world." 

The dome of the Invalides was gilded "because," 
said Napoleon, " the Parisians must have something to 
look at." 

In this paramount necessity of French happiness, 
"something to look at," he never failed them. It seems 
to me that the secret of French fickleness and ferocity 
lies in the simple fact, that they look for their pleasure 
outside the walls of home. An Englishman may be a 
perfect bear in his business, but the best part of him is 



256 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

sure to flower out at home; while a Freuchmnn wastes 
no sweetness on the desert air of his own house. It is 
a French fasliion that never goes out of vogue, to be 
devoted to one's children ; for their sake, the father and 
mother will do anything but love eacli other, or permit 
them to love where they will. It is the universal cus- 
tom for pnrents in France to select husbands and wives 
for their children with the proper amount of dowry. 
It is part of their devotion not to see them make beg- 
gars of themselves. Their marriages are not merce- 
nary, but suitable. Madame de Sevigne had great 
difficulty in "settling" that beloved daughter, for 
whom no one wns good enough. Her final choice was 
a mature marquis, who had been twice married already, 
which certainly proved that other women had thought 
him worth having. " He is a very good man," she 
writes, "and very gentlemanly — has wealth, rank, 
holds a high office, and is much respected by the 
world. What more is necessaiy?" 

Nothing, O, nothing, sweet Madame Sevigne, but a 
grain of true love to leaven the whole lump. 

Life is not worth having to a French girl till she is 
married ; her love affairs begin then, which necessarily 
introduce a vile and polluting influence into the light 
literature of the nation, since the heroine must always 
be a married woman, and the hero, not her husband. 

"It is to be feared," said old Fuller, "that those who 
marry where they do not love, will love where they do 
not marry." If men take the disease of love in the 
natural Avay, and cure themselves by marrying their 
choice, even if the marriage prove unhappy, the mem- 
ory of it softens and chastens all their lives; but 



A WOMAN'S VACATION, • 257 

love tnrned inward on itself, becomes a fierce yearnino* 
for some change in condition or estate, since one can- 
not change wives. 

I once heard a gnarled old sea captain, who had 
sailed all the waters of the globe, and made up his 
opinions of men and things on every shore, lay down 
the law on this matter. His brother, seventy years 
old, and a bachelor, had asked his advice about marry- 
ing a lady known to both. "If you like the gal, and 
she's willin', take her, and say no more about it. It's 
the only safe rule to go by in getting married." French 
people follow all rules excej^t this one, and it makes 
them "unstable as water." 

The Communists burned part of the Tuileries, and 
the remainder is used for offices in the business of ihe 
state; but they did not commit the unpardonable sin 
— they spared the Louvre. Royalty and despotism 
were as necessary to the existence of the Louvre as to 
that of the Pyramids; and I would have cried, "Vive 
le Roi " with the rest of them till it was finished. 

The Louvre reminds me of Tasso's moon : " Every- 
thing was there that is to be met with on earth, except 
folly in the raw material, for that is never exported." 
Its two great shrines are the Yenus de Milo, and the 
Immaculate Conception by Murillo. The Venus stands 
alone and stately, with her broken arras, in a room .by 
herself. It seems a glaiing mistake to call her a Venus 
at all ; it looks far more likely that she is the statue of 
" Wingless Victory," which stood in one of the Athe- 
nian temples, and was hidden in the island of Melos 
for safety. 

In the Vienna Exposition of 1873, some one has 
17 



258 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

raade a copy of her and finished it witK arms — one 
hand holds a mirror, into which she is gazing. There 
is no need to ask if a man did it; a woman would have 
known better. If the inexperienced sculptor had ever 
seen a lovely woman looking in her mirror, to see if her 
hair is parted evenly, or if her looks have fallen off 
since she looked last, he would never have created such 
an anachronism. The face is wholly earnest, with not 
a conscious or vain line in it. She may be handsome, 
but it is no fault of hers. She is a woman to be listened 
to, not looked at; a Minerva, rather than a Venus. 
She might be the noble head of an ideal " Woman's 
College," like Tennyson's "Princess," She has just 
uttered some high-born thought; the thrill and glow of 
it is yet in her eyes, and her expression is, "If this be 
treason, make the most of it." 

No picture can be placed in the Louvre until the 
artist has been dead ten years — long enough to break 
the influence of coteries, which, through personal preju- 
dice, might pave the way to poor pictures, or shut out 
good ones. 

The Louvre is the paradise of cherubs — they can- 
not be much more numerous in heaven. They are 
never more daintily fashioned than in two old pictures 
of the "Flight into Egypt," where they play with the 
child Josus, feeding him with fruit and trimming him 
with roses. In another, they are cooking a dinner for 
a saint, who is so rapt in devotion, that he takes no 
heed to his earthly wants. They seem much at home 
among the pots and pans. 

Rubens has a gallery of his own in the Louvre, and 
I would have made it a dark one ; he never paints a 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 259 

"woman to weigh less than two hundred pounds, forget- 
ting that a fat woman is as unpicturesque as a bony 
cherub. He is guilty of a heavy and naked procession 
in honor of "Religion and Virtue^' which might' be 
called the "Dance of Luxury and Vice," without an- 
other stroke of the brush. He is unsurpassed in paint- 
ing rear views of babies and cherubs, the only creatures 
to whom curves of unlimited fat are becoming. 

Mui'illo's pictures are always lovely while he deals 
with virgins and saints ; but when his genius stoops to 
beggar-boys looking for fleas, — which one must admire 
partly because Murillo painted it, and partly because 
it is so natural, — it goes against the stomnch of my 
sense. Neither fleas nor beggar-boys should have any 
encouragement to repeat themselves. I count it no 
credit to those old Dutc|i artists, that they could paint 
an old woman's wrinkles, or a brass kettle, well, when 
those things have no right to be painted at all. Only 
beautiful things should be made immortal; merely to 
be natural is a thing to be avoided, since it is as often 
disgusting as attractive. 

Rembrandt's pictures have an odd fascination ; one 
keeps looking at them as at faces with deep-set eyes. 
Webster ought to have been painted by the ghost of 
Rembrandt, and he would have looked through all 
time, as he did in life, wiser than any man ever was. 

Hazlitt quotes Milton's line of his style — 

*' He stroked the raven plume of darkness till it smiled." 

It somehow fits the subject of his criticism, but it is an 
unusually trying metaphor, if Milton did mix it. Wo- 
men may smile at handsome sable plumes, but it re- 
quires a strong imagination to see them smile back. 



260 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

We carried a catalogue as thick as a fnrnily Bible, 
and mounted a sort of art-v^taircase, the pictures grow- 
ing better and better until the crown room is reached ; 
here is the "Immaculate Conception" — "a woman 
clothed Avith the sun, and the moon under her feet, and 
upon her head a crown of twelve stars." In the in- 
numerable copies, the cherubs are done very well, but 
no one catches the right look from the Virgin ; only the 
orimnal looks into heaven. 

Raphael's "Beautiful Gardener" is fresh and brilliant 
as when he laid the last soft touch on her drooping eye- 
lids, and set her up to dry against the wall of his studio. 
In the same room is the famous " Monna Lisa," wiio 
turns the heads of all artists. She was the wife of a 
Florentine noble, and Leonardo da Yinci worked on 
this portrait four years, and then pronounced it unfin- 
ished. In life she is said to have possessed an inde- 
finable chaim that drew men to her against their will; 
when their fancy was once tangled in the wonderful 
corners of her mouth, they could never escape. But 
the uneducated eye sees little comeliness; one learns 
to admire her by continual tasting, as one learns to 
like olives. The first look i-^minds one of an Indian 
squaw; she is wholly free from ornament; she has no 
weapons \)\\l her face and hands, and a certain assured 
calmness, as of one who had fathomed this life, and 
could afford to smile at it. Only men can tell why 
they make a fuss over faces in which women see no 
beauty, and many have tried to tell the secret of their 
worship of the Monna Lisa. 

All the sweetest words in the language, stirred to a 
froth with the spoon of artistic fancy, are yearly offered 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 261 

upon her altar. "Whoever has seen the Monna Lisa 
smile," says Grimm, " will be followed forever by that 
smile as by Lear's fury, Hamlet's melancholy, and Mac- 
beth's remorse." 

A woman-artist had studied the Monna Lisa till she 
had made a perfect copy about six inches square. She 
only asked tliree hundred gold dollars for it. I hope 
that the Monna Lisa, wherever her spirit wanders, 
knows that her copied head brings such a price three 
hundred years after her death ; a w^oman must appre- 
ciate that if she were ever so dead. It would be one 
of the comforts not " scorned of devils." 

The famous pictures have all a row of copyists before 
them, like devotees before an altar; and some of them 
spend their whole lives in repeating one picture over 
and over. It seems like dull music ; but, then, every- 
body's music is dull except our own. 

The Louvre inspires the fear that the world will get 
too full of works of art, and some time, in the next 
thousand years, there will be a bonfire of pictures and 
statues, by general consent, to give room for new genius 
to spread itself. 

New- and endless rooms spring up as by magic, and 
give one at last that Mche of the mind which is worse 
than any bodily strain. When I could endure no more 
it relieved me to look at a gigantic face in bas-reliefj 
which has its mouth stretched in a perpetual yawn. It 
was a marble criticism that agreed with me. 

The fairest Venus ceases to be fair when the eye is 
clogged with innumerable Yenuses. A23hrodite parting 
her shell, and rising from the waves, must have been the 
loveliest sight in the world ; but when she does it every 
half hour, one wishes she had been drowned in the fWiti 



262 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

The crowd constantly passing through the galleries 
is well sprinkled with white caps and blue blouses — it 
is a free Art-school to them. 

We inquired for the Museum of Sovereigns, contain- 
ing relics of all the French kings ; but the guide as- 
sured us that it existed no longer. "France, being a 
republic, does not wish to be reminded that she has 
ever had a king." We groaned over our disappoint- 
ment, and the guide said, " Come next year," with the 
inevitable shrug which means everything and nothing. 
Only a silver statue of Napoleon, in a room studded 
with golden bees, marks where his collection was 
placed ; the cradle of the King of Rome is hidden 
under a dingy cloth. The rooms of the ancient kings 
are covered with an oaken wainscoting, delicate as 
lace; and the only furniture remaining are vases so 
large that a couple of life-size babies serve for handles, 
and might be drowned in them. 

My last day in Paris was given to Versailles, a palace 
of such gilded and painted perfection, that no creature 
made of the dust of the earth could ever feel at home 
in it. 

It is the monument of Louis XI Y., built by himself, 
as some ostentatious souls cannot trust their relatives' 
estimate of them, and buy their own tombstone. It is 
a type of his life in its splendid halls and galleries, and 
its little back passages and secret stairs. He called and 
believed himself a "Grand Monarch;" but his friends 
found him cruel, sneaking, and mean. He set the 
fashion of worshipping himself, and conferred dishonor 
as it had been high favor. He was specially cruel to 
women ; but it must be confessed that, first and last, 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 263 

they led liira a hard life, as they do every man who 
puts himself in their power. We can feel a respectable 
emotion towards only two of them, the first and the 
last — pity for Mademoiselle de Valliere and respect 
for Madame de M.iintenon. 

" She was ashamed of being a mistress — of being a 
mother — of being a duchess," says Madame Sevigne 
of the former; "never shall we see the like of her 
again." She was not a perfect beauty by any means; 
she halted in her walk, her mouth was too large, and slse 
was marked with the small-pox ; but she had a look so 
tender and modest withal, that one could not help lov- 
ing her at first sight. She was the queen, for whom 
Versailles was made so splendid a throne. She alone 
loved the king for himselfj but she was always ashamed 
of it ; and when Bossuet came to tell her of the death 
of her son, she cried out, " Why must I mourn his 
death, when I have never ceased to mourn for his 
birth?" 

The real queen of France looked on the gilded and 
evil doings of her court, and her husband, with a seared 
indifference. When she was told that the king had 
taken a new mistress, she said that was the old one's 
business — not hers. 

Perhaps Madame de Maintenon was equally to be 
pitied in that she had to bear with the querulous old 
age of Louis ; he was the most unamusable of men, 
and she had to provide him with conversation ; but he 
could give her power, and that was all she lived for. 
She had been so intimate with miseiy in her youth, 
that she wore it as easily as an old garment. 

Versailles heard all these feminine secrets, and keepa 



264 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

them still, written in invisible ink on its walls ; only 
the student of French history makes them stare through 
the gilding. The most important one was the private 
marriage of Madame de Maintenon to the king, and her 
wearing disappointment when no blandishments of hers 
could induce him to acknowledge it publicly. 

His confessor, Pere La Chaise, with her help, per- 
suaded the king to revoke the edict of Nantes, which 
let loose fire and sword on the best part of his subjects, 
the Huguenots, who carried their sober industry into 
other countries, like the Pilgrims of New England. It 
is but poetic justice that the great cemetery of Paris, 
the gathering-place of corpses, should be named for 
this Jesuit father. 

After the Revolution, when Napoleon came to look 
at what was left of Versailles, he regretted that the 
mob had not wholly ruined it ; but he repaired it for a 
national show, never living in it himself In the great 
Hall of Battles, he quite wipes out the obsolete glory 
of Louis XIV., who won his victories by proxy. 

It is a little surprise to American eyes to see the sur- 
render of Yorktown reckoned among French successes, 
and Washington playing second fiddle to Count Ro- 
chambeau. 

In this gallery I counted twenty-eight priests moving 
about in the crowd, whispering into its ears the anti- 
dote to the Napoleonic fever, inflamed by these pictures. 
They were working in the interest of the Bourbons ; 
but the Count Chambord, with his white flag, is a dull 
old king to conjure with, compared with Napoleon wav- 
ing the tri-color out of the canvas. 

The tovvn of Versailles seems to grovel at the feet 



A WOMAN'S VACATION'. 265 

of the palace, as all France did at the feet of its builder. 
The garden avenues and vistas are so contrived that 
there seems to be nothing in the world but the palace 
of Versailles. Even the chapel was so planned that 
the king's seat looked down on the preacher's desk. 
At the funeral of Louis XIV., Mnssillon proclaimed 
" God is great, my brethren, and God alone^^ which, 
in that place, had the effect of a piece of news. 

The guard demanded our passports to enter the 
chapel^ but a franc answ^ered the same purpose. 

We were allowed to see the state carriages, used at 
coronations, on a forbidden day, because we were Amer- 
icans ; it is as good as a season ticket all over France 
to be an American. 

We w^andered about the lovely gardens of Marie 
Antoinette's farm of the Little Trianon, and came una- 
wares upon the dairy and thatched cottage where she 
made believe to be happy in humble life ; but it was a 
kind of farming which obliges the owner to do some 
other business to support it, whereas Louis XVI. never 
could do anything well except locksmithing. He was 
the prince of hesitaters ; and the bright, haughty Marie 
Antoinette must have been terribly tried with him. 
He had not even sense enough to fall in love with her 
till they had been seven years married. 

Napoleon established Maria Louisa, his second wife, 
in the Little Trianon, an ill-omened place to Austrian 
archduchesses ; she must sometimes have put a steady- 
ing hand to her head, when she was reminded of the 
fall of her aunt, who had lived there before her. 

It is said that Maria Louisa cared for nothing but 
horseback exercise and four meals a day; even her 



266 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

son did not interest her. How tedious must her 
society have been to Napoleon, after the charming 
Creole ways of Josephine ! They had the same dress- 
makers, but Napoleon never ceased wondering why 
Josephine had always made so much more elegant an 
appearance. " Josephine had lost all her teeth," says 
Madame Junot, " but she still had the loveliest smile in 
the world." 

Fair France would lose half its fairness to Americans 
if the reign of Napoleon were crossed out of it. Ver- 
sailles was too magnificent, even for him, and he gave 
it to the nation with a grand air, as if they had not 
owned it before. 

These old palaces, too gorgeous for a home, but not 
for treasure-houses, are a lovely possession to have in a 
country: it is like having an extravagant grandmother, 
who ruins herself in diamonds ; her weakness may have 
made great havoc in the family at the time, and nearly 
brought the grandfather to think of divorce ; but when 
the old folks are dead, the diamonds remain an unspeak- 
able treasure and distinction to their descendants. 



A WOMAN'S VACATION 267 



CHAPTER XYIII. 



HOMEWAKD BOUND. 




** O, thrice happy are they who plant cabhages ! When they have 
one foot on the ground, the other is not far off." — Rabelais. 

"Y guardian angel must have been "asleep, or 

gone a journey," when she permitted me to 

cross the English Channel, without a friend to groan 
to, by way of Dieppe and Newhaven. Only two hours' 
sail divides Dover and Calais; but the misery is so 
concentrated that all who travel that way are certain, 
as was Queen Mary of bloody memory, that Calais 
will be found, after death, written on their hearts. I 
had a vain conceit that the torture would be somewhat 
diluted in a whole night's passage between Dieppe and 
Newhaven ; but to err is human. In the former, one 
dies but once ; in the latter, one does it over and over. 
The little cabin might have been a box of sardines for 
the close packing of its contents. The stewardess did 
her best, and "an angel could no more;" but it is the 
stillness of despair, not content, that finally settles 
down on us like a pall. Stranded among us is a baby, 
two months old, very red in the face, and wild in the 
eyes, but not otherwise aggressive. The wretched nurse 



268 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

has just strength enough left to aim at its mouth a 
long rubber tube with a bottle of milk at the other 
end. Tiie baby catches it by a miracle, and then we 
all fall back into a sort of heaving silence. 

"That child is drawing in nothing but air; it don't 
get the milk at all," says my next neighbor, in a deep 
whisper. " I've had eight, and brought them all up by 
hand, and I hnowr 

" Ah, well," I say, brutally, " it isn't our baby." 

" No ; but it will be our tonnent when the child be- 
gins to howl." 

The mother of eight was right, and outraged nature 
revenged itself in less than an hour. 

" I told you so," said my neighbor ; and the comfort 
of having her prophecy come to pass sustained her 
through the tempest that followed ; but I was driven 
on deck, where a crowd of hopeless men lay about 
loosely, like bundles that were waiting to be claimed 
by the owner. In the palace of the Luxembourg there 
is a picture of Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx in a 
boat, w^hich is surrounded by swarms of lost spirits. I 
did not notice it much at the time ; but the agony of 
those distorted faces came back to thicken the air as I 
assisted at this orgy of seasickness. What a comfort 
it is to hear even swearing in one's native language as 
the boat rubs against English ground ! We are like a 
train of ghosts as we file into the station. The baby 
is pale, but composed, which convinces rae that it is a 
girl — a boy-baby, under such abuse and neglect, would 
have committed suicide before morning. 

As we roll along towards London in a softly-cush- 
ioned car, an Englishman begins to "speer at" us in a 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 269 

general way about our president and his "third term';" 
but we have ceased to be Americans — we are only 
human beings. General Grant may live and die at the 
White House, and be buried under the piazza, for 
aught we care. We even smile at him when he says, 
" How much more stable and respectable your govern- 
ment would be if you would remodel it. into a limited 
monarchy, like the English one, and invite one of our 
peers — Lord ' Darby,' for instance — to rule over you ! 
He would never take the office, though ! " " 

"No, he never would," we repeat faintly, and the 
Englishman gives us up. 

It is good to look at the heavy, stolid English nav- 
vies, as they lean on their pickaxes along the line of 
railroad. They are soaked through and through with 
beer, and the very stones must needs cry out at them 
before they will see that their government does not 
recoo;nize their rio-ht to be men and brethren with the 
rest of their world. They are perfectly content to 
have their thinking done for them; but the French 
laborers are wiry and temperate, and give you slanting 
glances out of eyes that seem sharpened to a point, as 
if they might have a small store of vitriol at home, or 
a polished dagger waiting for an occasion. 

Then comes the swift journey from London to Liver- 
pool through a long flower-garden, which makes one 
wonder how so small a country could have made such 
a prodigious noise in the world. We are again on the 
doorstep of the old world, and the door will soon be 
shut in our faces. In the last interview, as in the first, 
it is the rule to buy an umbrella. " I cannot see," says 
my landlady, " what your people can want of so many 



270 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

umbrellas. It never rains in your country without let- 
ting you know a week beforehand." 

The homew^ard passage across the Atlantic is a trifle 
worse — a lower depth, a night without stars — than 
the voyage out. It is then that faithful Memory 
bestirs herself, and rakes up from forgotten hoards 
every collision and fire at sea and bursted boiler that 
has ever come within her range. When Mr. Jeiferson 
said, "How much have cost us the things that never 
happened!" he must have had home voyages in his 
mind. As I go down to my little inside room, secured 
at the last moment, I fear to look in the face of the 
strange woman who is to share it with me; but I per- 
ceive at once, in her deprecating air, that she is equally 
afraid of me. "Which berth do you prefer?" I ask, 
in my mildest tone. " Very well, I thank you," she 
replies, and I do not pursue the subject; in fact, I 
never pursue any subject with her, unless I desire to 
communicate my views to the whole ship's company; 
and I put it to the sympathizing reader who has fol- 
low^ed me thus far, whether, in a windowless room 
with a deaf room-mate, I might not as well have been 
a monk of La Trappe, who takes a vow of perpetual 
silence, and sleeps in his coffin every night. 

As I could have no "feast of reason or flow of soul" 
in my own room, it followed that I took a deep interest 
in n>y neighbors. On the other side of a thin partition 
were two old men, who had more to say, and said it 
oftener, than any two w^omen that I ever knew. One 
was a widower, and I devoutly wished the other had 
been so too. Day and night his cry was, " If I could 
only see my wife once more, I should be happy." 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 271 

When reminded that she was much better off where 
she was, he would desperately dechire that he did not 
w^ant her to be better off than himself, and I wondered 
whether this, was a universal masculine sentiment, or 
something peculiar to him. 

In the deadest part of a rough night I heard him 
moaning over the profanity of the sailors, lest it should 
bring us to shipwreck; but his room-mate comforted 
him and me with the certainty that no ship ever was, 
or will be, worked without hard swearing — nothing 
else will straighten a wet rope. 

These old men, with others of that Ilk, kept the clos- 
est accounts of the days and the distance ; but no two 
ever came out ahke. The women were never so far 
gone in boredom as to be beguiled into arithmetic. 
*i They have a fotal habit of telling the contents of their 
^^- trunks, and boasting of their bargains, when they know 
\ vwell that the passenger who sits muffled in his shawl 
at their backs may be an officer of customs in dissjuise. 
^ *^ Going over, the air was full of hope and expectation ; 

Jf i coming back, it is heavy with retrospection, more or 
^ <^/ less tinged with disappointment. 

^ ; The only party over whom contentment brooded like 
^] a dove was a company of fixe mature maidens, who 
had chosen single blessedness as the better part, and 
were inclined to look down on those imperfectly consti- 
tuted women, who cannot be happy without a husband 
and children. They were more akin to the oak than 
to the ivy. They had not been beautiful in their best 
estate; but so serene, resolute, and self-poised were 
they, that it seemed this world had no more to give 
them. Their lives are full-orbed with culture and 



272 BEATEN PATHS, OR 

travel. How superior they are to a lonely young 
mother, who had been sent abroad to recruit from her 
family cares, and was now going home paler than when 
she went away ! All Europe had been to her but a 
line of post-offices, in which she might learn that the 
baby had a double-tooth, or that scarlet fever was sus- 
pected in the neighborhood of her treasures. She often 
held an open book before her, but she never turned a 
leaf; and any one curious in the matter might catch 
a glimpse over her shoulder of a photograph of two 
moon-faced children, wdiile the single sisters read inde- 
fatigably in every language but their own. They were 
as little moved by seasickness as by the other ills that 
feminine flesh is heir to. One of them knitted for eleven 
days on a bit of green wool through all weathers, and 
as I watched this bilious piece of work grow long, I 
seemed to see a time, far off, but apj^roaching, when it 
shall be a matter of course for this sort of women to 
select and marry gentle, timorous, unsophisticated men, 
and guide them safely through the perils of this world. 
Longfellow speaks as one having authority when he 

says,— 

"It is the fate of a woman 
Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is 

speechless, 
Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence ; *' 

but in that day, when women have ceased to " wait," 
these verses, with a thousand other harpings on the 
same string, will sound like the fancies of a distem- 
pered brain. The old poets will have to be weeded of 
their follies. 

Only once did this pioneer band show the weakness 



A WOMAN'S VACATION. 273 

of their sex. Four of them were sitting at breakfast, 
and the youngest and comeliest remained in her room. 
My next door neiglibor looked along the line atten- 
tively. "Where's the pretty one of your party?" he 
asked — and if looks could slay, he would never again 
have beheld the wife he yearned for. 

They lay unmoved in their beds when a great wave 
poured down through the sky-lights into the state- 
rooms, and set everybody's boots afloat like a fleet of 
boats. Neither did they scream when the father of all 
rats walked down the passage to see what had hap- 
pened. It was a positive comfort to hear the shrill 
voice of the old-fashioned sort of woman crying out 
for her shoes. " O, we are all going to the bottom — 
give me my shoes — I must haA^e my shoes!" and the 
grave voice of her husband replying, "Isabella, recol- 
lect yourself! People who are going to the bottom 
have no need of shoes." In the hereafter, when our 
children go abroad and the waters overAvhelm them, it 
will be the woman, who will turn out to rescue the 
floating shoes, and calmly advise her nervous husband 
to recollect himself. 

The long lane turns at last. There comes a white 
morning when all our world goes on deck to see the 
great steamer pull up at the wharf, like an animal 
guided by reins. It is like that other resurrection at 
Liverpool, save that a certain sense of responsibility 
lengthens every woman's fice, a haunting thought of 
pearl, and coral, and carved work, and shining silk, 
which were things of beauty in the buying, and will 
be joys forever in the wearing, unless the custom-house 
18 



274 BEATEN PATHS. 

swallows them up, leaving only a great remorse in their 
place. 

At the last moment I go down once more into the 
depths, and I hear my ancient neighbor say, as he puts 
a fee into the hands of the steward, "Make a good use 
of it, my boy; don't waste it;" and that is the last I 
know of him for this world. 

An inundation of friends pours over the side, and 
the pale mother rapidly dissolves into tears of joy; but 
the five Vestals, who are pledged to tend forever the 
sacred fire of literature, walk on shore as calmly as 
they sailed the sea. They have brought home great 
store of wisdom, which they will air at their clubs and 
sift through magazines; but the mother, from all the 
cathedrals and pictures of the old world, has drawn 
but two great convictions that will never depart from 
her. First, that Raphael must have known children 
like hers, when he painted the two cherubs that lean 
on their elbows out of lieaven, in the Sistine Madonna ; 
and second, that when the Psalmist said, "Mark the 
perfect man," he foresaw the American husband. 



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